If We Want Peace, We Have To Choose Peace

Peace is not passive. Peace is an active choice.

After speaking at an event recently, I got chatting to a man who had moved to Ireland to work.  While sharing his experience of relocating here, he asked me if I had ever worked abroad. I have always been based in Dublin. I did have opportunities to take roles abroad, but it was always a choice because career opportunities were so abundant in Dublin. I told him I was a beneficiary of the timing of my birth, that when I was leaving school the economy in Ireland was taking off. This is true but it wasn’t the full story. I was also lucky enough to turn 18 in 1997 at a time when the conflict in Northern Ireland was coming to an end. While there are many things that have contributed to prosperity in Ireland over the last 25 years this was, no doubt, a significant one.

The first time I ever voted was in 1998 in the referendum to reflect the change to our constitution required to ratify the Good Friday Agreement₁. I can remember casting my vote as an 18-year-old, wanting peace. When the 25-year anniversary of the GFA happened in April this year, I thought of how far we have come. I understand much more today the magnitude of voting yes than I did in that moment. Not everyone was or is happy with every single piece of the GFA. Division remains but regardless the majority of people in Ireland, north and south of the border, want it protected fiercely because it provides us with something that is so precious; peace. Because of the GFA, a whole generation of people have lived without violence.

A Peaceful Place To Call Home

Earlier this year, I watched an interview₂ with the Irish actor Colin Farrell. While LA has been his home for many years, he spoke of how it still feels different to him when he is flying to Ireland; ‘I am going ‘home’ – I drop it… about two octaves because its deeper in me, that place is deeper in me… [Ireland] makes sense to me in a way… no other place would have the business making sense to me’.

This is exactly how I feel. Although I have never chosen to work abroad, I have travelled a lot. I undertook a solo round the world trip when I turned 30, lived for a year in Barcelona when I changed career six years ago and I have always travelled extensively for work. I love exploring the world, meeting interesting people and learning about other cultures. I still feel excited every time I go away. But when I land back in Dublin airport, I relax. This is my place in the world. I belong here. I feel that deeply in my body every time I return from a trip; this place is part of me, and I am part of it. Everyone, regardless of where they are born or choose to live deserves to feel this way about the place they call home. To have a place they belong and a place they feel safe. Peace enables that.

I am more aware of my good fortune these last few years because conflict in the world is rising and with that a refugee crisis is growing. I feel deeply the responsibility we have for people forced to leave their home because of war, human rights violations, or environmental and climate issues. By a chance of birth, I live somewhere I don’t have to flee or leave. But if I did, who would look out for me? If I had to leave the security of my house, my family, my friends, my community, the agency I hold over my life and dreams – would there be someone who would greet me, hold me, tell me that I am safe somewhere else? Would a stranger in another country use the agency and freedom they have to lobby their government and business leaders in the hope it would help me? Would they do anything at all?

In that question I am really asking myself– what am I doing for them?

Cultivating A Sense Of Connectedness

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Martin Luther King₃

When I researched non-denominational spirituality, the most common theme to arise in peoples’ experience of spirituality was connectedness. They felt a sense of embodied connection to something divine, a life force. This sense of connectedness helped them feel a deeper sense of connection to the world around them and, more broadly, humanity. They all discussed experiencing a sense of ‘oneness’ defined as the ‘belief in the spiritual interconnectedness and essential oneness of all phenomena₄’. More simply, they felt we are all connected and, because of that connection, understood the responsibility we carry for each other.

Connection is a felt experience. We don’t ‘think’ we are connected, we ‘feel’ connected. Our tendency to run from how we feel dampens our sense of self and with that our connection to each other. This has huge consequences for us all. The problems of the world are all rooted in disconnection. Climate change is a disconnection from our environment. Mass inequality, racism, war and acts of violence are a disconnection from each other. If we have to disconnect to cope with what is happening in the world around us, it is telling us something is wrong.

Once we open our hearts and bodies to this sense of connectedness, it is almost impossible to not feel the lack of safety, the pain, the fear, the loss of life we are allowing other people in the world to endure. I have found myself riddled with anxiety and grief these last few weeks. My sleep is disturbed, I am waking up in the middle of the night with the sense something is wrong. Because something is wrong. We are supposed to feel this way because it is a signalling to us that our service is required. Lack of peace anywhere impacts us all. Somewhere deep inside us, we know if everyone is not safe, we are not safe. We know if it can happen in someone else’s country, it can happen in ours.

Peace can only start with each of us. The more I am at connected to and at peace with myself, the more I can be connected to and at peace with others. I rise up from small inter-personal conflicts and day to day nonsense and have greater capacity to see real conflicts and problems around the world that deserve my attention. I am more capable of holding nuance and complexity because with greater calmness internally, I can sit with the reality that most situations have two opposing perspectives. If I can hold that uncertainty, I don’t try and shut you down to return to the perception of being certain. When I do my own inner work, I can actively move towards and advocate for peace and harmony in my life, my community, and our world.

In the end, it will be our ability to lean into and feel a sense of connectedness which will save us. When the pain of what we witness around us will be enough to sacrifice the power structures and ways of being that we have tolerated to date.

Do We Value Peace?

There are many reasons to avoid conflict. Outside of the shocking loss of human life; lack of peace puts pressure on global resources, it displaces people from their homes, it causes social unrest and is a threat to democracy. It destroys infrastructure and buildings (schools, hospitals…) and invariably it increases poverty₅. But war and conflict are also big business; it is beneficial to some to allow that to continue. Over €2 trillion₆ was spent on military defence globally in 2022. This number is expected to grow in 2023 as conflict around the world rises. While expenditure on humanitarian aid also grew in 2022, it remains completely eclipsed by the amount of money spent on military defence. Surely a better long-term strategy would be coordinated and dedicated spending on building and maintaining peace?

When I speak at events, I always ask the audience what do you value? Over the last few weeks, I have been asking myself do we value peace? We live in a world that only values things it can put a price on. But there is a difference between what is valuable and what has a price. What is most valuable to us often has no price but to live without those things carries an unbearable cost. The cost of loss of human life, the cost of families torn apart, the cost of injury and trauma, the cost of destruction, the long-term cost of poverty. No child should live in a war zone, no person should be without basic human needs, no one should have to suffer because of their religious beliefs and violence of any kind should not be tolerated. Creating a world which values peace and human life requires us to know the difference between what is most valuable and what simply has a price.

Peace Requires The Highest Form of Leadership

I have written before about how my own purpose journey began the morning after the US Presidential Election in 2016. I was on a work trip in the Middle East and was due to give an early morning presentation. Given the time difference, I was waking just as the result was being called. I vividly remember standing in my hotel room watching the news. Dismayed, I had a deep feeling of needing to act. To do something. We are all entitled to our own political views so maybe you were a supporter of the successful candidate. I think it is clear I wasn’t. But that’s not the point. Political candidates I don’t like often win elections. My dismay was based on how the election was won; by harnessing division. It is the most primitive form of leadership that divides to conquer.

When it came to peace in Ireland, we were blessed to have leaders such as John Hume who in the face of ongoing violence, disappointment, and regular sabotage of talks by terrorist groups maintained the vision and tenacity to insist peace was the only way. To choose peace every time and offer a better future for all people on both sides of the conflict. I am also acutely aware peace on the island of Ireland would not have happened without international intervention. An agreement was found because international communities stepped in and helped to facilitate it.

What the world needs in this moment is visionary leadership. Leaders who can hold a vision for the highest possibility for our global community. Leaders who feel that deep sense of connectedness to all and act from that place, transcending the individual desire for power, to make choices in service of the whole. Leaders who know what is valuable not simply what is profitable.

Ultimately, this is about us. To encourage and enable visionary leadership, we need to become visionary citizens. Not everyone in the world has the power to decide who leads them but chances are if you are reading this – you do. We are always choosing who we gift power and control to whether we realise it or not. No politician is elected without a large team of people and no CEO can deliver results without access to the intellectual property of each individual employee. If we want visionary, compassionate leadership who can demonstrate the integrity the world needs, if we want leaders who believe peace is a priority, we must take responsibility for choosing them and empowering them.

The Need For Global Citizenship

If we want peace, we have to choose peace. Peace is not passive. Peace is an active choice. Life is presenting us with a choice about who we want to be and the world we want to live in. We have been complacent with democracy, assuming we would always have it. Those responsible for hate, divisive policies, war and violence do not share our complacency. They have conviction. They are completely committed to what they are doing. Their conviction combined with our complacency is a dangerous combination. The rest of us need to summon up a higher level of conviction for the peaceful world we want.

Bill Moyer described citizenship as the first form of social activism₇. Any great leaps forward in humanity have always been citizen-led, not politically led. Politicians are consistently late to the tone of their electorate. Invariably, the population always appears more compassionate, more connected to the needs of humanity than those who lead them. The civil rights movement in the US, marriage equality and repeal the 8^th amendment in Ireland, Black Lives Matter, the #Metoo movement were all citizen-led. Both political representatives and corporate organisations caught up afterwards.

Source: The Four Roles of Social Activism₇

In a more globalised environment, the world is our community. We cannot have all the benefits and visibility that technology, mobility, and globalisation offer us and then decide we will turn off when it exposes us to the pain in other areas of our world. We are responsible for creating a global environment in which all people can flourish. I didn’t study human potential because I want one or two individuals to be able to self-actualise and live out their potential. I am passionate about human potential because I believe in our collective potential. Not who I can become, or who you can become but who we can become. It is this vision we have to see and hold for ourselves and demand from our leaders. As global citizens, if we want a better world, it is we who are responsible for birthing it.

References:

₁About the Good Friday Agreement | Ireland - this is Ireland

₂Colin Farrell & Jamie Lee Curtis | Actors on Actors - YouTube

₃Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.] (upenn.edu)

₄ Garfield, A. M., Drwecki, B. B., Moore, C. F., Kortenkamp, K. V., & Gracz, M. D. (2014). The oneness beliefs scale: Connecting spirituality with pro-environmental behavior. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 53(2), 356–372. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12108

₅The Cost of Conflict - Finance & Development, December 2017 (imf.org)

₆World military expenditure reaches new record high as European spending surges | SIPRI

₇The Four Roles of Social Activism by Bill Moyer - The Commons (commonslibrary.org)