There comes a day in our childhood when we pick up a
stick. It helps us to feel just a little braver. But, like any gateway drug,
the effect has diminishing returns, and we progress to sharper, harder, more
sophisticated weapons. Words. Behaviours. Until everyone is on edge, and it
only takes a spark to set off a powder keg.
Peace asks us to decommission our arsenal. To return
words to their healing, life-giving potency. To beat swords into ploughshares
and spears into pruning-hooks. To let fallen sticks lie, in peace.
This, too, is learned behaviour. Takes time. Change,
by degree.
The best way to begin to deactivate our weapons is to stay
curious. The simple principle of imagining, what could this sword be repurposed
as? Hmm, might it become a ploughshare? Or, in concrete practice, the
discipline of asking, when someone says something that raises our early-warning
systems, ‘Oh? What makes you say that?’ and, ‘Oh. What makes me respond to you this
way?’ The former question helps us understand where the other is coming from,
map terrain together, perhaps find common ground. The latter question—which perhaps
should be the first?—helps us understand our inner geography, those thick layers
of neighbourhood we cherish, the helpful and harmful histories that live within
us.
‘Peace be with you.’ ‘And also with you.’
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