Healing Space | You are your peace in a chaotic world

World peace is largely a myth. What you can do is examine the parts of your life you can make peaceful. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.

People are always waiting for this mythical thing called ‘world peace’. But when has the world ever been peaceful? The first part of the 20th century was marked by depression, war, famine, drought, struggles for women’s rights, voting rights, worker’s rights, fights against apartheid, racism, caste and for indigenous communities, against disease, pandemic, illness, colonization, communal riots, assassinations, and after a brief interregnum of peace, the world feels like it’s teetering again. Truth is, the world swings between periods of hate and peace, rarely consistently, in one part of the world or another. It’s just that we notice Israel and Palestine, Ukraine and Russia, and American involvement more than we do Yemen, or North-Western Nigeria and Afghanistan until something there threatens our own safety and peace.

People who are peaceful in their everyday lives contribute immensely to how peaceful the world remains.

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While it is important to act to keep peace when we can, where we are, there are factors and events always beyond our control. When we observe events, we can notice that a few people, either individually or in groups, seem to make decisions that affect the collective. They seem to make these decisions out of the most negative emotions possible – anger, resentment, frustration, grief, rage, envy, and with an inflated sense of identity, nationalism, pride, religiosity, and other such feelings. Everyone who ever has such intense emotions always feels justified in having them. ‘This was done to us and that was the result,’ they will point out. And they may be entirely right, whichever party or side they may be on. If you shift perspective sufficiently, you will always be able to find reason to agree with an aggrieved party. And truth is, all of us in the world are constantly aggrieved. If you have not hurt someone personally, perhaps an ancestral identity, a group, something you are related to, a company, community you belong to, or nation you’re a citizen of, basically some form of belonging in your identity, has inflicted and/or received hurt in multiple ways in the history of the world. There is sufficient suffering to go around. There is simply no one who has neither inflicted nor received hurt in the world. The question that most people tend to rely on for their ethical choices, is ‘am I justified in inflicting harm?’ when the question really should be; ‘what is the way in which this cycle of harm that has continued ceaselessly can now be stopped?’.

There are many reasons for harm and violence on any subject to continue. If you look hard enough, you will find them. There is only one way in which harm and violence ceases – when the person inflicting it decides they will not be responsible for perpetuating harm in the world. By this alone harm ceases. There simply is no miraculous peace that descends on the world. There is no collective sensation of calm that falls from heaven. There are only choices that people make individually to not pull a trigger, to not play with the war machinery, to not engage in hostilities.

Whether this is people in power, such as presidents and prime ministers, policy makers and influencers of world events in such ways, or you and me in our housing colonies, in our living rooms and bedrooms, children on playgrounds and in schools, we are constantly making choices to keep the peace. We see someone engaged in a conflict on the street and we cross the road and go our way, or call the police if we feel someone needs help. We act in ways that enforces the law and order, and we avoid exacerbating anger. When we do our bits to keep the peace, it may not seem like it much, but we are contributing immensely to that which is not war in the world. Because we are not in positions of power, we imagine that our contributions do not matter in that way, but they do. People who are peaceful in their everyday lives contribute immensely to how peaceful the world remains. People who make a conscious choice not to provoke, not to exacerbate, not to retort when they can, not to ‘teach people lessons’ and ‘put them in their place’, who forgive, have compassion, do good, pick up litter, won’t contribute to pollution and won’t use plastic straws, who speak softly and kindly, who say please and thank you, who won’t discriminate, who deploy their courtesy and kindness in the service of the world on an hourly and daily basis, are the ones working the hardest to make the world a peaceful place for most of us. As the Tamil Sangam poem puts it, ‘because some men won’t eat alone, this world is’.

Do not underestimate your personal contributions to calm and your conscious choice of peace in your daily life. It is much needed, deeply felt, and serves as a quiet role model for the warmongers around. Keep keeping the peace. It matters.

How not to get drawn into the chaos