Finding Peace in Upsetting Times

"All we are saying is give peace a chance." ~ John Lennon

These are difficult times. There is a catastrophic civil being waged in Syria, a land grab in Ukraine, global warming, world-wide privation, and in the U.S a failure to address chronic socioeconomic, judicial and educational disparities between the haves and the never hads.

Add to this a U.S. presidential election so crude, contentious, hateful, petty and stupid the entire world is wondering what the HELL is going on in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

No wonder we're all walking on eggshells. Once again, does any of this sound familiar?

We all experienced feelings of foreboding in our personal lives as we navigated through our journey while being constantly bombarded by the confrontations The Addiction would lay across our recovery pathways. Many of us are challenged even as our children triumphantly struggle through their own recoveries.

We have been threatened psychologically and physically. Now, a world in chaos only adds to our depletion, to our exhaustion.

So how do we find peace?

We don't want to start from the very beginning as sung in "Do Re Me" from The Sound of Music. That would be a disaster to go back to the cloud forest, the muck and the shit.

What we can do is to remember HOW we embarked upon our journey, how we took that first step or initial crawl out of our personal primordial soup of despair. We can be better than the world in chaos and the petty little politicians. We can remember our goal to somehow, eventually and on our own terms find our truest selves. We can look beyond the crap being spewed all around us to see the potential glories awaiting us on that next plateau.

We cannot succumb to the negativity that creates neither a benefit to our progress nor a loving or consciously kind state of mind for the children we cherish.  We can simply focus on our journey and by doing so, become beacons for The Good rather than additional catalysts for The Bad in the world.

There are enough souls out there fueling the fires of negativism, adversity, hostility and distrust.

Remember, The Addiction feeds on the negative. Our children can sense this when we exude defeatism, that pessimistic resignation to all that is hurtful and destructive to our recoveries. If we resign to the darkness we risk becoming dismissive to our sons and daughters and through our actions travel down pathways we've been before and don't really want to visit again. Feeling abandoned, our children will return to the only NORMAL they know - The Addiction.

By being true beacons of The Good rather than joining the chorus of discord we may find our own peace and perhaps, show the way for our children. We may feel we are in the minority, we're not. We are the quietly strong, not the bellicose insecure. We can't be shouted down forever. Hang in there. Give peace a chance!

It will find us. And it will find our children!

... keep coming back

"Take care of yourself. You never know when the world will need you." ~ Rabbi Hillel