Peace For Everyone
Resetting Onself
I was just home in Alabama a few weeks ago. Most of my family gathered at my mother’s house, the house we grew up in and where my mother, now 92, still lives; lives alone taking care of the house and an acre of land.
We had a great time all being together. While there I reflected on a conversation I had recently with my mother. She had said that Author, an elderly gentleman, 86 years old who has done yard work for my mother for years; she said Author had been over wanting to work. She said she had been glad to see him and that they had gotten a lot done. She said when Author comes over to work she has to get outside and work along side him otherwise he will go too slowly.
She had said that Author had asked for a raise. He said, “Mrs. Shoffeitt they’re paying $12 and $15 and you’re paying me $9.” My mother responded, “Author, you’re old and slow you’re lucky to get $9.”
It always does me good to get back home. I always feel like I’ve had my batteries charged, kind of like I’ve gotten myself reset.
You know how on a lot of the electronic gizmos we have there is a reset button. You try to get the thing programmed to do what it’s supposed to do and if all else fails you can push the reset button or you can hit a key and restore the factory default settings.
I’ve often thought how good it would be if we came equipped with a reset button. It’s so easy to get off course, to get wound around our own axels as we sometimes say in the south.
All of us thrive on being in the zone of living well, being right with ourselves, those around us, our friends and our responsibilities. I use acupuncture and a lot of times when I leave one of those sessions, except for a chronic pain I cope with, I feel as good as I ever feel. I feel like everything is in balance. I feel good. I feel at peace with the world.
I have such a good feeling that I want to guard it. I think about what I can do to maintain and safeguard this feeling. If I do this, eat that, drink this, is it going to enhance or is it going to disturb this good feeling, this positive sense of balance and harmony.
Achieving and maintaining a sense of peace and harmony is the high goal of living well. Because you are here I know you invest your energies in achieving this goal. And while maybe none of us will achieve the reputed success of the legendary guru sitting on the mountaintop, we can and do achieve a high measure of this enviable goal.
Isn’t this a big part of what is involved with being successful in life? I think it is; achieving peace and harmony.
Auburn, my school, fired their football coach this week. And right at the holiday season too. Tommy Tuberville, the coach, is going to have to try to make do with 5.1 million dollars. That was what he got to buy out his contract.
I think I’d make a good coach. I’ve been waiting by the phone for the athletic director to call. I’m beginning to feel that I may not be on his short list. But you know what I’d tell the players if the AD calls and offers me the job? I’d tell them that since we are here, playing this game, doing all the hard work that practice and the games require, we might as well win the games. It’ll be a lot more fun than loosing.
That’s how I feel about life. I’ve often thought there’s no better reason to strive for success in life than the simple fact that we are here, caught up in this life mystery. Since we are here, since we have this life to live, we might as well do it well. It will be a lot more fun. The way I figure it, the best way to cope with this mystery of life is to live it well; be able to look back on it as you go and say, it’s good, it’s going well so far. I’m living the harmony.
And I’ve discovered through the trials that life has given me the wonderful reality that you don’t have to live a charmed life, you don’t have to require that the way be easy; you know, no illness, no early deaths of loved ones, no mistreatment, injustices, no pain. You don’t have to be lucky. You don’t have to win the lottery to be successful in life. You can be successful, by this I mean achieve peace and harmony, no matter what you find on your life path. And when we get a little off course I think finding a reset button that we can push from time to time can be a tremendous asset in our efforts to live well; in harmony with all that is.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a reset button we could push when we drift from harmony, when we let life events disturb our peace? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a default key to press that would restore us to the factory settings of love, peace and harmony.
For you see, God is our manufacturer and God is love. And you and I are not only the products of love, we are love. Love is both the raw material of which we are made and the finished product, it’s who we are.
We come into the world with the high potential of being love and participating harmoniously in all of life. But we can get distracted from the wonderful unfolding of the love within us and get caught up in the struggles of others who impact our lives and before long we can find ourselves joining those who are playing off key.
Now, it’s not reasonable to expect we will never get off course. It’s not reasonable to assume we can ever and always maintain peacefulness and harmony. None of us go too long before letting our peace and harmony become disturbed. Everyday someone mistreats us or something highly distracting occurs. Whether it’s malicious or unintentional, all of us suffer injustices, worries and distractions. And all of these things invite us to lay aside our peace and cause our harmony to be disturbed.
We’re all alike in this way. But learning how to quickly reset when this happens is one of the key ingredients of living well, a way of spending more time in the zone of peace and less time in the dreaded territory of restlessness and disharmony.
So how do we reset?
One of the ways we do this is to be selective about what we allow to disturb our sense of peace and harmony.
Several years ago, while a college student, my son raced cars. And while no one in our family was happy about this, we recognized and respected John’s ownership of his life and his freedom to decide how to live, what to do. And so I tried to go to his races.
In a road race at Road Atlanta John was pushed into the wall and totaled his car. Other drivers witnessing the mishap strongly felt the other driver of the car that John had collided with had caused the accident and felt John should lodge a complaint. John thought it over and while he did take steps to make it less likely that another driver might get caught up in the kind of mishap he had experienced, he said something very profound when that night as he sat with his friends and fellow racers. He said, “You have to pick, you have to be selective about what you get upset over. There are for sure going to be things that you need to get fired up over, but you need to make sure that the one before you is one of these.”
I think what John said that fall night in Georgia is one of the essential keys to resetting, achieving and maintaining peace and harmony. We need to be selective about what we get riled up over, what we let cause us to abandon a place of harmony.
Second we need to explore other alternatives to abandoning our peace. For example, a few weeks ago while on a road trip with my son, some one angrily pulled around us and threw up her hand in the kind of salute that only requires one finger. And I thought, “She doesn’t even know me. I bet she’d like me if she got to know me.”
When disturbance looms large I try to choose another thought path than the one I’m being invited down. Instead of going down the path of anger and hate, I try to choose another path, sometimes humor, sometimes love, sometimes simply a no; I’m just not going to go there.
Potentially unsettling incidents energize us and where we spend that energy has a lot to do with what happens to us as a result of the incident. Letting that energy fuel an act of love or caring is one of the best things we can do at times like this. Such acts serve to remind us of where and how our interests are best served. Being a loving creature always serves us best. And exercising love is mutually exclusive of disharmony and restlessness.
Also, we need to distance ourselves from those who regularly and predictably invite us away from our place of peace and harmony. Sad as it is, there are those that for us are what Wayne Dwyer calls “toxic.” There are people, for some they may even be family members that you’ve grown up with, who regularly and predictably disturb your sense of harmony. We have to distance ourselves from toxic others, enforce boundaries and remove these people from our lives and not let them back in while they are being so toxic for us. You are not good for everybody on this planet and everybody on this planet isn’t good for you. And some on this planet particularly are not good for you.
And it’s not just people that can be toxic for us; other things can be toxic and disturb our peace. TV news programs and other programs, newspapers, organizations, places of employment can be toxic. A good friend never watches TV news. He stays informed through an Internet news site. Another turns off her telephone during meal times and every week on Sundays. Another refuses to participate in gossip. She has a no comment approach to gossip. It just isn’t possible to engage her in a conversation that involves criticizing people who aren’t present. In so many ways we can filter out input that is toxic to us.
Viewing disharmony, peacelessness as an interruption, by definition a temporary place to be, can also be helpful.
And so when something assaults our peace we need to take care of it as quickly and as effectively as possible because when it comes right down to it you and I, being the loving, playful, light hearted, peaceful creatures that by design we are, simply don’t have time for such interruptions.
My good friend, Stu Brown, often quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; and you shall begin it well and serenely.”
Finally sadly, I think, we are often the authors of these assaults on our tranquility. We neglect our basic needs, don’t take good care of ourselves, get too busy, learn to worry too easily. So much of the work we need to do to avoid these distractions that take us away from being the fun loving, peaceful person we were made to be so, much of this work we need to do at home with ourselves.
You and I, at our best, are deeply spiritual beings, a part of all that is and when we live in harmony with all that is we claim our rightful place as a part of the whole, what we call God.
So what about you? How do you build, safeguard and avoid prolonged or frequent interruptions to your peace and harmony?
How do you reset to the factory settings? I’m going to ask you to think about that now in a few moments of silence. Sometimes it’s something we do or a place we go to like the park I often visit. Sometimes it’s an inside ourselves place that we go.
When your peace gets disturbed how do you reset? How do you get back to the factory settings of love, peace and harmony?
