You dropped your peace.

Lately I’ve seen a handful of articles about “finding peace” or “finding inner peace”. In fact, there’s a simple step-by-step guide on wikiHow.

A few months ago I wouldn’t have seen anything strange about this. But lately I’ve had my entire understanding of peace changed.

I’ve been studying Hebrew. I’m not very far in, but I am far enough in to know that the way to say hello and goodbye is “Shalom” – literally meaning “peace”. Many people are aware of this. But what’s more interesting is the way to ask “How are you?” and to respond with “I am well”.

“Ma Shlomech?” or “Ma Shlomcha” – “How are you” to a man or woman, respectively.

“Schlomee tov” – “I am well”.

These  translate to “how is your peace?” and “my peace is good”.

You may see where I’m going with this.

I’ve also been using an amazing meditation app, headspace (highly recommended! search online). In the app, Andy (the meditation guide) offers a different insight into serenity, calm, and peace. He speaks of these as the blue sky, and stress is a bunch of clouds. We only see the clouds  and forget that the blue sky is behind it – but the blue sky is always there even if it’s hidden behind clouds.

Both of these are an understanding of peace that is very different than the articles I mentioned earlier. Those articles treat peace as something that can be found, and if it needs to be found, something that can be lost.

But the Hebrew language uses peace as a thing with states of being (good or bad) just like us. And Andy teaches that stress merely hides peace. The thing in common with both of these is that peace is always there, even if it doesn’t look or feel like what we expect it to.

For me, this is an interesting paradigm shift – and a helpful one. Since hearing these, I’ve begun thinking of peace less as something to chase and pursue (and even stress myself out over) but more as something that is, and condition that always exists. And when clouds roll over my peace, or my peace “is bad”, I remember that it is still there. And while I can take steps to ease the stressors, this view relieves me of that pressure to keep chasing after peace or try to force it to be what I want it to be. It gives me the freedom to just let it be – and when I do that, I often end up feeling more calm and peace without actually having to “find” anything.