Painstaking But Sure-Footed: Creating Peace One Person at a Time
View your life with kindsight — from wisdom of the sages
Peace is not some abstraction far beyond our reach. It begins with creating a circle of trust and friendship right where we are. Each of these circles expands to include more people; this is the basis of global peace.
— Daisaku Ikeda (from Quotations by Daisaku Ikeda)
Creating peace is as easy as introducing yourself to a stranger and connecting human to human, forming a bond based on trust, respect, and mercy. And as difficult.
We tend to stay in the strata of society where we feel most comfortable — our “peeps,” our homies, our tribe. There is a resonation that develops between us that is comforting and reinforcing. This safety zone is deceptive, however, since the reality we are ignoring can easily come crashing in. It is only through seeking to understand people who are vastly different from us that peace is possible.
“Though some might believe that most wars are fought over religion, a more contemporary understanding (Hobfoll, 2019) is that “wars are always tribal,” and an individual’s religion is but one of many affiliations that lead people to indulge in tribalistic violence: the current war in Ukraine, initiated over Russian…
