Thoughts about peace

Peace

To me it’s the feeling of calm, the feeling of not having any troubles. Why should there be wars, why should there be such things as harm, pain, misery and suffering? Without all this it would be peace.

Another thing connected to peace is friendship, not having to be friends with everybody in the whole world but to feel friends rather than enemies with others. In a way it is to NOT be angry, hostile, having a “dislike” with people, our differences is not the thing, it’s about not feeling that another person is someone not like, to hate. About friendship, it is also the positive feeling towards life itself, a kind of optimism towards not only humans. To feel friendly towards the world, to everything outside of you, and even yourself. It’s when you are happy inside, you enjoy the existence of yourself and of life. Something like the idea that everybody should enjoy what we have together, to share the joy of what we are given. Peace could also be more spiritual to me; it can be about the emotions and the peace of mind, that you aren’t a pessimist, not mad at the world, not disliking your life and so on.

Peace is more of an absence of bad things than that something necessarily need to be added, at least how I see the definition of the word. There are of course people who would say that you have to include “good things” to have peace, but the good things could be the absence of the bad stuff.

In a way, peace is the state of the perfect world, kind of the better endpoint at the ultimate scale of good versus bad.

Helping people

Central Asia Institute - Greg Mortinson

The first thing to say about the clip is that it shows what everybody should contribute to: a better and fairer life for all humans all over the world. We don’t have to do the exact same thing as Greg and travel to help, but to help organizations that do it. I think the way that they try to help in this clip is very good, education is always something that develop the whole picture a lot. It is the reason why the west is so ahead economically, the efficiency of a society is largely affected by education. I can’t understand that it takes so much time to get the world on feet, haven’t we been aware for at least 50 years that all countries haven’t got the same standards? I think everybody would like to contribute to a fairer world, but most of us just think that they can’t make any difference. Maybe we are scared too, when terrorists come from a certain culture, we seem to think of everyone in that culture as a terrorist. So we might not be as willing to give because of that. Of course it takes time anyway. To build up a structure with education and so on will take generations, but we are certainly not helping as much as we could.

To do what Greg does can seem to be very generous and life sacrificing, but if we think of what standard we could help poor people to come up to, Greg is not going further down in standard measurements than that. I don’t say that I easily would give up the life standard I have today, the standard of “rich” countries, I just say that we are too stuck in the illusion that we NEED to have this standard to have a good life. We need food, water, love, warm clothes, a house and when we can get even more, sure it’s not a bad thing, but when people don’t have water there is something wrong when others get super expensive stuff.