Fighting for peace.
As soon as I hear that, I think of old-time propaganda.
Trying to declare war while still seeming like the good guy, you can say “We’re fighting this war because we want peace, and the other guys, they’re the ones that want war, so we have to beat them so we can have peace.”
It really sounds like a joke, really.
Fighting for peace.
But when I think about it, there is something real to this.
Because what would it mean to have peace without fighting?
If we had a world that was entirely peaceful, then we wouldn’t need to fight.
But as long as there is fighting, as long as there are threats, there are people acting against us, there is chaos, there is life happening, there can never be total peace.
Now, I know that that doesn’t sound very optimistic, but it seems to me like that’s nature.
Nature is full of individuals, communities, that are fighting against each other, fighting between each other.
There’s always fighting, there’s always chaos, to some degree, in the world.
And so to just want peace without fighting: I don’t even see how this could be done.
Because if you simply choose to stop fighting, then other people will take what you have.
They’ll move in.
We can imagine that simply stopping fighting will lead to peace, but it seems like that’s only possible if somehow all the world agrees on this without exception.
Now, that’s not to say that we should have a state of total war at all times.
And in fact, the value of peace is very real.
We need to have peace.
But how do we get it?
It seems to me like we create pockets of peace, fighting around the edges, keeping an orderly interior and pushing chaos out to the edges, guarding the edges.
So that’s where this idea of fighting for peace comes in.
iI we want to have peace we need to fight to keep things out that disturb the peace.
So I’m thinking of this in our lives.
If we simply say “I will be entirely peaceful, I will not fight and I will just let peace reign”: well, then, we are constantly assailed by different actors that they want us, they want us to give them their money, give them their attention, give them our life force, really, just like work for them, and pay attention to them, and pay them, and reward them.
And we have all these demands around us from everywhere.
And if we simply refuse to fight and declare peace, well, you can see that our minds will simply be overrun.
And I see that with so many people that are very well intentioned, but they don’t maintain their boundaries, and other people simply step in, and they farm them, really.
They just use them for their own benefit.
So in order to have peace we need to fight for our own boundaries.
We need to be able to say no.
We need to be able to make a wall, a barrier, between what’s inside and what’s outside.
And we choose what we’re going to let in.
We need to have that gate.
And having that is fighting.
To have a wall, to have a gate, to have people trying to get in and we’re saying no: that is fighting.
And that’s what I mean by fighting for peace, as paradoxical as it sounds.
So I’d be curious to hear what you think of this idea.
Is there any value in it, or is it still that old propaganda line being repurposed?
#fightforpeace #personalboundaries #maintainboundaries