February 11

  

Today's Quotation:

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace
in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others.
And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

Etty Hillesum

Today's Meditation:

The peaceful people that I've known in life have been those who have most affected me in positive ways.  I've always admired the way they accept things that happen without losing their peace of mind over them--if they decide that something's bad, they simply resolve to do something about it, and then they do that something.  Their peace doesn't leave them.

When peace leaves me, it's usually replaced by frustration or anger or resentment, but never by anything else that's healthy and positive for me.  My tension level goes up, and that affects the way I deal with other people, my health, and my perspective on life.  In other words, I become a person who's not very helpful to other people.  I cannot spread peace and goodwill while peace is not the dominant aspect of who I am.

I love Etty's use of the term "reclaim."  This puts the idea of looking for peace in an entirely different framework, one that makes me think that the peace is already there, just waiting to be pulled to the surface.  And when I do find peace after periods of tension or frustration, that's exactly what it feels like--that I've re-established contact with something that's been inside of me all along.

Perhaps my goal should be to keep the door to my inner peace open all the time, and not to let these other feelings close it when they want to have control of who I am.

Questions to ponder:

1.  Is there peace inside of you?  Where is it today?

2.  How can I help others more when I'm at peace?

3.  It seems that most of the things that we lose our peace over look
much less important in retrospect.  How can we try to see their true
importance (or lack of importance) while they're affecting us, instead of after?

For further thought:

If we have no peace, it is because
we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

Mother Teresa