Peace in the Moment
I think a lot of people come to therapy or to faith seeking the same, simple solution. They need and want a mechanism to find peace in the moment. They need a balm they can apply to a stinging, sometimes even burning emotional or mental wound. We, as a species, are becoming increasingly bad at soothing ourselves and each other, and the repercussions of that play out everywhere, all around us, all the time via the media, and only make the issue worse. We are driving ourselves and each other collectively a little BATBLEEP, it seems.
I was just puttering around in my kitchen, waiting for water to boil for coffee, because I am totally insane and make coffee via cone drip, one cup at a time, and I noticed some crumbs under my toaster. Now, while I am doing all these simple, rote, quotidian things, I was also thinking about love.
The great luxury of getting older is that now I know myself well enough to know and feel my value deeply, so I know that I am worthy of love. Not everyone feels that way. In fact, many of us do not. Many of us are seeking love rather desperately, then rejecting it as soon as it becomes “complicated” or “difficult.” Life is so hard, we want love to be easy, but that attitude almost makes it more difficult.
We cannot convince others to love us or do the work required of love. And it is a lot of work. Being lonely is hard, being in a long-term relationship is hard. We have to “choose our hard” so to speak, which is ten, nay, a thousand times harder if we are traumatized. Being alone is almost always easier if we have been hurt before. Being angry is so satisfying if we have been betrayed before. Being critical, judgmental, or half-committed feels much better than all-in, ready for compromise, tying our goals to someone else who may, in fact, turn out to be a demon.
Faith, I have learned, is a useful tool when working on commitment. Faith in Good (or God) is a belief system, just like negativity or atheism is. Experimenting with faith, prayer, positivity takes commitment, just as long-term love does. The most traumatized among us (myself included) are the worst at having faith and we also need it the most. We need some way to tell ourselves it is going to be okay. Some of us keep searching, others resign ourselves to the dark, steadfast in our commitment to being angry, self-medicating with people, places, or things.
Whenever I pray, I allow myself to have a little faith that God (or Good) will sort things out, and strangely I do actually feel better. It’s weird for me to think such things. There is some cynical part of me that feels stupid in the moment and judges the use of the word “God” specifically. But I’ve also decided, to alleviate the complications of being raised as an atheist, that at the bare minimum I should be allowed to believe in Good, and using God and Good interchangeably feels good enough for me. I easily can think to myself “Good will sort it out” but once the pain and strife of religion is removed, and the openness and possibility of a Universal Good is applied, it actually feels a little silly and exciting to use the word God, so I’m just going to keep doing it.