This year, Queen Mimi's peace challenge was to "Change the Room":
"How do you keep your peace when all around you is chaos? The planet is groaning for peace and stability. We can change the atmosphere by walking in daily calmness and joy, even during the darkest of days. What fuels your inner peace? Tell us how you do it. We'll learn from each other."
Every story has to start from the truth, and my truth is that the last time I remember feeling peace was a very long time ago. A friend made me find that truth. She asked me to walk my spiral, to return to my centre and find that moment I lost my sense of peace.
I was about eight years old and beginning to realise my country was at war. I read my first newspaper story about a man and his wife being tortured. Not in some faraway unknown land but in my own back yard area. And the ground beneath my feet, that had felt so permanent and comforting, turned to mist.
"Never apologize for showing feeling.
When you do so, you apologize for the truth."
Benjamin Disraeli
So here is my truth. I had my first panic attack in a new country where the same old patterns of violence and war were being repeated all over again. I was 18, but that seed of anxiety was sown ten years earlier when that little me read about unbelievable cruelty and realised it was real. Real people doing terrible things to real people.
I hid my anxiety for decades, ashamed of what I saw as a flaw, a weakness. I hid myself away behind many masks. I was the clown and the joker, the comforter and advice-giver, the person who (according to many) "lit up the room."
If I could not feel peace, I could be peace.
“To live in the light of a new day and an unimaginable and unpredictable future, you must become fully present to a deeper truth – not a truth from your head, but a truth from your heart; not a truth from your ego, but a truth from the highest source.”
Debbie Ford
My truth is that I have never truly felt safe since before I was 8 years old, but recently I have finally begun to feel inner peace. I have accomplished that by doing two things:
1. Owning my truth.
2. Accepting there is no solid ground beneath my feet.
My room is a sailing ship out at sea. I have learned to rise and fall with the ocean below me, to weather sudden storms and not drown in irrational fear. I surf my moments of extreme anxiety like the dolphin in the water below me. I am learning how to swim with them, to dive deep and not lose my breath.
There can be peace on the ocean as well as on the solid shore.
I found this beautiful song this year. Thank you, Bukahara. It's the perfect way to end this blog post.
