Pain in the Ass Peace

Dear Friends,

After a full roster of clients in Manhattan, I fell into my seat ready to dream and drift my way home on the Empire Line. I tucked myself in on the river side of the train and breathed my way into the sun setting over the Hudson. No sooner had the sky burst with color, the woman in the seat in front of me began a series of high volume phone calls replete with intimate details about her finances.

I kept looking out the window wishing that I couldn’t hear the panic in her voice. I tried to stay neutral but my nerves were already sensitized from a full day. I longed for the tranquility of the setting sun to reach into her heart and calm the choppy waters.

The wisdom inside of me said: “Jennifer, this moment is still peaceful. Enjoy the peace.” The me-voice inside of me felt frustrated. “Peace,” she said, “is a pain in the ass.”

Beauty, bliss, and harmony, how we usually think of peace, do not exist in a vacuum. They are predicated on the far less comfortable aspect of Peace which arises when humans collectively protect each other. When we share the desire to love who we love, to care for each other, and to serve the best and highest interests and experiences of as many of us as we can, we create the conditions for the blissful experiences we long for.

Inevitably, our aspirations are imperfect. Inevitably, we experience dissonance and disagreement. We get triggered and want to make our discomfort someone else’s fault. But deep down we know that stability and safety leads us from chaos to collaboration and even further into creativity, pleasure and thriving.

Pain in the Ass Peace requires us to widen our capacity to tolerate each other and to learn how to get along. Pain in the Ass Peace requires us to have a connection to ourselves, to know how to meet our own needs, and to build capacity to endure the times that we can’t. Pain in the Ass Peace requires us to be able to speak our minds and hearts with eloquence and honesty. Pain in the Ass Peace requires us to be uncomfortable a lot of the time so that we can experience states of bliss as often as we can.

Was I annoyed that my beautiful sunset was disrupted, yes. And I appreciated the gift of collective safety, where we were all ok as we traveled to our loved ones human and furry.

Pain in the Ass Peace isn’t glamorous, but it is worth preserving personally and within our community.