Peace with a Capital P
For my first 22 years of life, I knew peace with a little p. My needs were met and my family loved me. I wasn’t a happy person, necessarily, but I was safe. I knew the comfort of a protected life. Had the internet been around, I may have been a naive girl who posted pictures of my sheltered lifestyle with the #blessed.
When I graduated from college, I started to suspect that my little p peace was manufactured. I increasingly experienced fear and anxiety, which I covered up with the brave act of getting completely hammered. If my peace was manufactured, then I could most certainly manufacture bravado.
This strategy held up for a few months until, two months shy of my 23rd birthday, my father died suddenly and unexpectedly. Over the next couple of years, I moved to the shiny, stinking city of San Francisco, delved deeper into depression, and watched my mother remarry. But instead of looking for solutions to my pain, I doubled down on the numbing nothingness that I found in alcohol and presented myself to the world as a fearless and fiery rebel, a patron saint to other sad drunks.
This manufactured courage carried me, swaggering and stumbling, through my 20’s and early 30’s. After the end of a desperately desired relationship that I clung to well after its demise, I began to realize that my aging body wasn’t responding to my old coping mechanisms very well. Drinking and smoking now left me sick for days, and without these habits, I noticed for the first time that peace with a little p was gone.
It was at this time that I became aware of Peace with a capital P. I had been gifted a couple of books on meditation and, after one bout of depression that left me in my car, pulled off to the side of a country road, sobbing hysterically, I decided that I had nothing left to lose. I may as well give this meditation thing a whirl.
(It sounds trite to say now, but that’s how flippantly I made the decision to save my own life: with a shrug of the shoulders and a detached, “Oh, why the hell not?”.)
The practice of meditation and the study of Buddhist philosophy introduced me to the concepts of suffering, non-attachment, and equanimity. With a newfound understanding of my suffering and a sense of solidarity with all beings who suffer (meaning: all beings), I slowly, over the course of a year or so, began to feel a warmth and presence that I’d never experienced.
Now, I look back on my losses as necessary steps on a pathway to capital P Peace. When I write about Peace, or urge others to consider it as a possibility, it’s with the understanding that it won’t be obtained without walking through our suffering, without befriending it, understanding it, and coming out the other side.
I don’t want to promote the #blessed lifestyle and the little p peace that comes with it. I want all beings to drop their manufactured coping mechanisms and learn to grapple with their own pain until we all emerge, tender and open and full of compassion. Creating Peace with a capital P is not for the avoidant, the weak, or the shallow. It’s for the brave of heart, willing to learn and change and grow, so that all beings may be blessed with happiness, safety, and good health.
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