"Each one has to find his peace from within.
And to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances." - Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

We are always searching for peace within. Our lives are full of turmoil and struggle that throughout everything we look to find peace. We pray to God or Allah or whomever for peace and undersatnding. As Gandhi said, that peace can only come from ourselves. It cannot come for other sources such as other people or things. We look outside of ourselves rather than within to find the peace we are craving. How many times have we tried to fill the void of peace with people and things only to feel unsatisfied?

We are constantly looking for ways to provide ourselves with peace and tranquility whether it is through hiking, socializing, yoga. What if those things are only giving us a false sense of peace because we still have all our inner turmoils, whatever they may be? We need to learn to calm the storms within in order to find the true peace Gandhi spoke about. A lot of the time all we want is to be at peace when something happens. We think accepting the situation and having peace are the same thing, but what if they are not the same?

How do we calm those storms and find true inner peace when the world around us is in constant turmoil?

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

Life has a way of turning our world upside down; flipping everything as we know it around, and flip it inside out to the point where we have no idea what is up or down anymore. During those times we tend to just want to stop everything and focus on the problem at hand. We focus so much of our energy on that one issue that it is all we can think about, all we can address at the time. Everything and everyone else around us fades away to the background, sometimes we even seclude ourselves from those around us and try to deal with things on our own.

During those times we forget that life does go on. There are people missing us, things piling up that need addressed. We cannot pretend that the world is on hold because something occurred in our lives that threw us for a loop. Life progresses and we should also. We need to be able to put that issue aside to experience life as it happens, but we always have a hard doing just that. Even if we go out with friends or family, we are distant and lost in our own thoughts. Why do we do this, and how can we break free from the vicious cycle that is life’s turmoil?

How can we allow life to go on when it seems like everything is coming a part all around us? How can we pretend to be happy when it seems like we are surrounded by sorrow and pain? It’s a hard thing to understand and try to do, which is probably why we are so comfortable in trying to hide from the world during our moments to trouble and heartache.

"We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us." ~ Joseph Campbell

We are constantly trying to plan out our lives. What we want to do, who we want to marry, how many kids we want, where we want to live etc. We want everything to work out the way we want it too. In high school and college we plan where we want to be in 5 or 10 years. But how many times do those plans actually work out? How many times do our plans work out exactly the way we expect them too? Hardly ever! Then when things don't go the way we want them too, we get upset and claim it isn't fair.

Too often life has other plans. There is something else waiting for us rather than the plan we want. Most of the time we come out for the better with some of these plans. A lot of the time we expect things to be just the way we want them too, we are selfish in nature. And when things do not go the way we had planned we freeze and aren't prepared to handle it. That is probably why everything seems so much harder to bear, because we don't plan on the bad t hings happening. How could we?

How can we plan for someone in our family or ourselves getting cancer? Or a loved one dying unexpectedly or some other trial we face each day? How do we know how to plan for those things, so that we are able to live the life we are meant to live? How can we not look to the future and want to plan and then be disappointed when those plans fail?

"We cannot fight for love, as men may do; We should be wooed, and were not made to woo." ~ Helena: "A Mid Summer's Night Dream" (Shakespeare)

Being back on the dating scene, it seems as though chivarly has died. Very few men still uphold the gentleman standard and try to woo a girl. It seems to be unheard of for a man to pick a woman up for the date or pull out her chair, help her with her coat on. Either that or I have dated really crappy men. Even if a guy did those things claiming to be a true gentleman, he still attempted things lets say were very ungentlemanly.

It seems that having those expectations of being wooed is frowned upon by many men, and I'm not saying all men are ungentlemanly, just that they are already taken or are well hidden. So many guys want to be king, but then treat women horribly, and still expect us to swoon over them and hop into bed right off the bat. What happened to wooing, falling in love, and knowing each other before taking that step?

Gentleman kindness has been replaced with "woman go make me a sandwhich". Many men think it is okay to be rude and unkind to women and still expect to be treated properly. How many women have thought "he was such a douchbag" as opposed to "what a gentleman"? There have been men who will tell me to my face on a first or second date how beautiful my chest is...How is that supposed to woo me as opposed to make me feel like he's not all that interested beyond sexual things?

Is that all there is anymore to dating? Has chivarely really died out and been replaced with uber-machoism? What happened to wooing a girl and asking her father permission to seriously date his daughter? Okay so the last might be extreme, but still would be nice to be respected and wooed instead of expected to be the one chasing and when we chase we come off as being "overly attached". What's a woman to do to find a gentleman anymore? Until proven otherwise..chivalry is dead.

"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated." ~ Confucius

There are many times throughout life where we say that life is too hard, that we are unsure if we will be able to make it through. Times when we want to flat out give up on everything and stop trying. Especially if the trial is something small. We tend to make a mountain out of a mole hill as the saying goes. We want everything in life to be easy going and smooth sailing, without having to deal with anything else than what we want to happen. It seems a lot of the time if it is something we don't want to happen or don't want to consider dealing with we either say it is not fair or it is something we cannot handle. We make it more complicated than it should be.

Life is really simple as Confucious said. We have friends and family to rely on for support, but many times we do not take advantage of that. We look at life and see so many complications, so many struggles and stress. What if, if you looked at all the good in life then the struggles and stress and complications aren't as bad? We look at all the negativity in life, what if when we look at the postives, then life doesn't seem so hard?


We cause our own drama in our lives. We allow ourselves to hold grudges against someone or let how they think affect our lives in a negative way.If we aren't struggling with some trial life throws we are causing drama one way or another. We make things more complicated when we act this way. How often have we said "I won't go to the party if so and so will be there" or end friendships because we broke off a relationship?


Why do we do this? Why must everything in our lives be made more complicated than need be? And it is no one else's fault but our own. We create over half the complications in our own lives. But then the question is, how do we stop and make life more simpler?

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
― Mother Teresa

Often times we are too quick to judge someone. We take one look at someone and think we know them based on color, gender, dress, even how they wear their hair. We jump to conclusions quickly and don't really take the time to get to know someone before we judge them. So if we judge to fast how can we learn who they are and know whether or not we actually do like them as a person and not as we perceive?

How many times have you judged someone then got to know them and learned they are completly different than what you thought? Now if we took the time to know someone rather than judge right off the bat, we would learn who they are inside rather than what we think based on stereotypes. There would be more love in the world rather than hate. There are so many things going on in the world that cause turmoil, so why do we need to add one more thing by judging one another?

Once we begin to judge one another and refuse to take the time to love them, then we begin to judge ourselves and open ourselves to the same judgement we give.

"That's not fair!" - Sarah
"You say that so often, I wonder what your basis of comparison are" - Jareth ~Jim Henson's The Labyrinth

Way too often when something we don't like happens in our lives we claim it is "unfair" or "unjust". But like Jareth says in my favorite movie what is our basis of comparison? What do we have to compare what is fair and unfair too? How can we honestly say something is "unfair" when we don't know exactly what is truthfully fair or unfair?

So many times when we go through a struggle we think "its not fair, this is happening" or even "why me," "why must I go through this." Our only basis for what is fair or not is our own experiences and desires. If it is not something we want or want to do then automatically it is not fair that we need to do it. Or not fair that someone has something we want. When you think about it, that thinking makes us completely selfish.

We tend to think we are entitled to a life that is "fair" by our own standards. When things go "unfairly" we pout, wimper, cry, whatever else we need to do to deal with what we feel as being treated unfairly by either our fellow man or the universe. We begin to think the universe is out to get us, to knock us down. But what if we are getting exactly what we deserve? What if all of our hardships are fair? Isn't it fair for us to get what we deserve whether it is good or bad?

Abandon Hope All Ye

"“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate” - Dante’s Inferno (Translation: Abandon hope all ye who enter here)

I think a lot of the time when we are going through a trial we throw ourselves into our own personal hell. We tell ourselves there is no hope, and we abandon all thoughts of things good and focus on the struggle at hand. We convince ourselves there is no hope of making it through the struggle, no hope of being happy, no hope in general. We trap ourselves in a hell we create for ourselves. We abandon all things that once brought us happiness and see the pain, hurt and all things that come with going through hell. We don’t see a way out of our hell.

We like to try and find reasons for us living in these hells; reasons that are not our own. Who wants to admit they created their own hell? We create our own versions of each level of hell, one seemingly worse then the last. Each struggle we go through always seems worse than the last even if it is something we have gone through before. It is so easy for us to lose grip on the hope we are so desperately trying to find.

Even though we say we don’t like the hell we live in, but at the same time it is a sort of comfort zone, something we know and are used to, while at the same time we crave paradise. We are desperately traveling through the hells of life, sometimes getting lost in each “level.” Sometimes we thing we have made it through to the next level or to Paradise, only to realize we have only either traveled in circles or entered into a new “level” of hell.

But how do we find our way out of this hell we create? How do we like Dante make our way to Purgatory and then Paradise? Since we create our own hells, shouldn’t we also know the way out? Or do we simply sentence ourselves to a lifetime of hellish struggles?