The Path to Inner Peace
Dear friend,
The world outside of us is unknowable.
Our Dad lived counter to this, he had an uncanny ability to know something about everything and anything anyone spoke about.
Not an uncommon trait for men of his generation and something that seems to be amplified in current generations by the divisive tendencies of online algorithms and the power plays of those who harvest opinions for personal gain.
A room full of Dad’s holding forth, multiplied endlessly in the cloud.
I can’t recall any moment where he used the phrase “I don’t know.”
Maybe with Mam he was more candid, but with me and brother, even as we grew into maturity, Dad was so incredibly certain in the way he spoke about people and places and events and relationships.
This person is like this and that person is like that. He knew how the economy worked, the ins and outs of political power, morality. You name it, Dad had an instant and firm position he was prepared to stand by and defend almost at any cost.
When you’re a kid that’s kind of reassuring, then later, as a teen, building up your own model, it’s infuriating. As he slid into the confusion of vascular dementia, the fury made way to frustration and loss and grief.
He held on to what little control he had by refusing the help offered him
“Dad if you had a key safe then the carers would be able to come in and help you whenever you needed it.”
“Dad if you had the fall monitor the ambulance would be able to come if you needed it.”
“Dad..”
No
No
No
Not having it.
No way
Not now
Not ever!
You learn to accept.
You learn to love what you thought you never could.
You learn that only love really is the truth.
I’ll never forget his face, pressed to the wired glass of the care home security doors, expectantly hoping I’d be taking him home. Me, knowing I wouldn’t. That this place was where his path, for this life time would come to an ending.
That the day was approaching when Mam would come for him and he’d be free. The pain of refusing to feel so much greater than the breaking open of the heart space in the days and weeks and months and years following his death.
How much of our suffering can be traced back to our fears for the loss of a false conceptual mind made model of who we are and how we should be? How life should be?
It helps to let go of illusions, but how do you know what’s real when you’re in the thick of things?
We can get to know our collective and individualised models of reality, but reality itself, the totality of the diversity of life on our planet? We have to say we don’t know.
This not knowing is the threshold we pass time and time again on the path to inner peace.
Acceptance is a key to the threshold.
Accepting that we don’t know and despite the reductive training we endured in school and college and beyond, we’re not meant to know.
Accepting that we are creatures that contain both light and shade.
Accepting our wounds opening the way to healing.
The path to inner peace is transformative. We will not be wearing the same clothes or carrying the same baggage when we greet ourselves at our journey’s end. Even to speak of an end is not correct.
There is no end.
Our soul transcends the body and the mind made identity of each life time.
The path to inner peace is not preparing us to escape the world, but to enter more fully into the life within us.
The inner soul identity and its mysteries.
The treasure that does not rust or rot and cannot be stolen.
By thieves.
Like time and ego.
There is no other place, no other time.
No matter how much we long for it.
Peace
When it comes,
It comes now.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey