Serenity

Serenity can be seen as a synonym for peace, of course.  But in our lives, each of us defines words for ourselves.  Your idea of what peace is will differ from mine, and my idea of what the word "discombobulate" means will not be the same as your definition.  To me, the word "serenity" indicates a state that many of us try to achieve, while peace is the quality that we pursue while trying to achieve a state of serenity.  The reason that so many people fail to achieve a state of serenity, though, is that so many of us are pursuing peace rather than trying simply to uncover peace.  After all, peace is here within us all along, and our pursuit keeps us too distracted to look inside for the source of peace.

When I arrive at a state of serenity--even if only momentarily--I'm able to look at the world without feeling that there's something I need to be doing to try to fix things.  I feel that it's okay to let the world turn without my assistance, and that I don't need to be judging other people and what they do.  Serenity allows me to relax, which allows me to sink even more deeply into the state, and it allows me to feel that it's fine to simply be, without always having to do things in order to prove that it's okay to be.

The peace that we seek has to do with acceptance.  One of the reasons for which we often tend to reject acceptance is that we've been taught that if there's a problem we need to fix it.  Unfortunately, though, many of the things that we see as problems aren't problems at all, and our lack of peace is simply our unwillingness to accept something that we don't feel should be the way it is.  In my life I've spent many a stressful hour fretting about something that in the end I never changed, and that in the end, I found out was fine just the way it was.  If a friend was about to make a huge mistake and wouldn't listen to my advice, I stressed--and what the friend did turned out to be fine anyway.

My other huge mistake has been stressing about futures that never showed up.  "If this is allowed to go on," I would tell myself, "then these negative things will be happening in my future."  And my lack of serenity that happened because of the chaos that was going on in my own mind turned out to be a waste of time.  Those negative things never happened, so I was spending time far, far away from a state of serenity for absolutely no reason at all.

Accepting things doesn't necessarily mean that we approve of them.  Accepting them as they are at this moment doesn't mean that we can't try to change them.  But accepting them does allow us to have a certain degree of serenity in our lives, and it allows us to let the peace that's already an important part of who we are come to the surface and give us a much healthier perspective on life and living.  Today I want to spend time in a state of serenity, and if I want to do that, I need to allow the peace inside of me to become the peace that influences me more than anything else influences me.  It's in there, and it's waiting patiently to come out and to fill our lives with itself.