“Make Peace”. “You should make peace”. What does that mean to you? Personally, when I heard these words I took them to mean that I needed to do something, make something happen, often unpleasant because I needed to acquiesce, apologize and otherwise grovel until the other party forgave and life could then resume.

But the definition of Peace is something different than I was expecting. It literally means the absence of conflict. Freedom from conflict, a time when war has ended…tranquillity. Even simply the absence of noise, movement or activity. Stillness, quiet.

This may not be newsworthy to you but for me, once I sat with this information and applied it to my personal circumstances, I felt a completely different emotional reaction.

To seek peace and pursue peace does not necessarily mean that I must make something better, or return something to where it was. To think of the application of cessation from war, the fighting ceases but the repercussions of the battle, the scars and the losses are still felt. Maybe even more so. In the calmness and quiet of peacetime, you have the ability to evaluate what has happened and where you are now, which most likely is a very different place than where you started before the war. For good or bad, you are changed.

Your soul, your view, your surroundings, even are not the same now. You survived a war, a time of battle and a negative experience both in the giving and receiving. So this time of peace, of reflection and evaluation, you must accept that things are not the same. In the stillness, in the quiet, you are in a different location emotionally, spiritually and maybe even physically than you were before the fighting began. There are consequences of the war that cannot be ignored.

So in this state of making peace or searching for peace or being at peace with the situation you find yourself in, I feel, there is a recognizing of change…perhaps even irrevocably, of yourself and all other parties who were involved.

Feel that quiet, that stillness and calm. And in it find the compassion and honesty to see that things will not be the same. And with that comes a sense of hope. Because if conflict arose, things should not be the same as they were when the result was war.