That elusive “inner peace”

For a short period of time, I had found my inner peace. It was heaven. I had made peace with the big existential questions of life by deciding it was all right not to have all the answers. I stopped allowing other people’s lives, interferences and reactions affect me. I felt focused. I felt relaxed. I had accepted that life would never be perfect but that I’m very blessed nevertheless.

Heaven on Earth, I tell you.

You know that inner peace? I seem to have misplaced it and no matter how hard I look for it I can’t find it.

I still know somewhere in the back of my mind that it’s all right not to have all the answers.

But some questions are really bugging the heck out of me. Not that I’m doing much to figure them out. The big questions just need so much time and energy. I’m tired of the big questions. I want life to be simple and straightforward. Why isn’t life simple and straightforward?

And then there’s people. What the FUCK, people?? What is wrong with you lot?? First there are the bloodthirsty terrorists. Then there are the bloodthirsty governments. Oh, you know who you are, you evil pieces of shit. And then there are all the sick idiots who support one or the other. And then there are all the borderline sick idiots who just need the tiniest flicker of a push and they’re legitimately shit crazy. They don’t even realize how crazy their beliefs and ideologies sound. It’s like people have decided to turn off their brains. They turn off their brains and some crazy dude starts telling them what’s right and what’s wrong and they blindly follow. Not only do they blindly follow, if you’re not blindly following with them you don’t even know what kind of a reaction to expect from them anymore.

Maybe I’ve lost my inner peace because all this crap is just too close to home now. I can’t crawl into my batwoman cave and pretend it all doesn’t exist.

I have friends back in Egypt who are in jail on the most ridiculous and outrageous charges. I have a friend who has been given the death sentence. I have a colleague who was brutally killed in a government-led massacre of a peaceful sit-in. I come from a country where terrorists just destroyed a plane full of tourists with a home-grown bomb. That country of mine seems to be self-destructing at a lightening-speed pace. I have close family living in Egypt where crime rates are soaring; crime rates that are supported by the corrupt idiots who call themselves police. Did you know that in Egypt, when your car gets stolen, you report it to the police, give them your number, and shortly afterwards you get called by the robbers who stole your car so they can broker a deal with you to return it for a certain large sum of money? That’s standard practice. I swear to God I do not lie. And now, you have no idea what you might say that gets picked up by someone who decides you are a threat to the State and you suddenly find yourself in jail. A young man put Mickey Mouse ears on a picture of Egypt’s president and shared it on Facebook. The picture went viral. He got THREE YEARS IN JAIL.

In my country, scientists, SCIENTISTS from our beloved military announced they had developed a machine that looks oddly like a metal detector that can diagnose AND treat AIDS and hepatitis with 99% accuracy.

That’s not to say that there aren’t good people around anymore. There are. But the voices and actions of bad people are so much louder and have so many impacts on the rest of us that it seems they currently have the upper hand in this world right now.

Is it possible to have inner peace in a world like ours today? Is the only way to find inner peace to become a hermit? The problem is that I know that won’t give me inner peace. I need people. I need interaction. I need to be connected. I need movement. I need change. I need to be a part of this world and to have some sort of an impact on it. I don’t have what it takes to be a hermit.

Is the loss of inner peace a natural consequence of the state of the world today? Are we all destined to be anxious, chronic worriers? Or is there a way to be able to acknowledge that the state of the world today is the state of the world every day since the world began? It is. I know that. Maybe we’ve just become constantly bombarded with information; constantly bombarded through social media with idiot people. Is it possible to find inner peace if you distance yourself from all the information and all the idiot people? How, then, do you keep in touch with reality? How, then, do you avoid being a naïve, disconnected fool? How, then, can you yourself be some sort of an agent of change?

I miss my inner peace. The thing is: I didn’t always have it. Yet I was able to find it. It was a long, difficult process. But I found it. I have an idea what that process involves. Maybe life is about a perpetual cycle of finding then losing inner peace. I’m hoping that now I’ve found it once, finding it the second time won’t be so arduous.

INNER PEACE! COME OUT, COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE!