Human mind is a centre of perception and thinking in connection with the heart subjected towards understanding, awareness of surroundings, circumstances and behaviours. There has always been and there will remain a need to keep our minds and hearts in a state of peace and tranquillity in order to respond positively towards changing situations.
Building peace in our minds and hearts is a step wise journey. At every step there comes unwilling situations and hardships. We need to control our emotions and reactions in order to cope with hardships. The meaning of peace is often illustrated as our comfort and contentment which in actual is a wrong perception. There is a quote: “A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are made for.”
Similarly, we are indeed safe in our comfort zones but this is not what we, humans are meant to live for. The creation of human with ability to think and feel has purpose, purpose of struggle. There comes a time when one has to come out of his/her comfort zone letting oneself to commit mistakes and then correcting them to experience new learnings.
For establishing peace, we must answer the questions: Why we have lost harmony in our behaviours? Can we repossess peace? The answers are a matter of one sincere thought to ourselves. We need to acknowledge that our values are changed, our way of thinking about people lack optimism, rather improving ourselves we have become judgmental towards others. As the process of building peace is a journey, the foremost step in this journey is to explore yourselves.
We cannot claim anything about anyone based on external appearance because we never know what other person is going through unless we go and make an interaction with him/her. For an instance there is a girl who is not much talkative having a quit nature and speaks rarely to someone. I, at first thought she has attitude or she considers herself good than others so don’t make talk to people. Whereas, I was wrong. This judgemental approach only lead a person to misunderstandings, loosing of relation and eventually loss of entire peace.
To bring peace in our minds and hearts, we need to change our approach, our understandings and our values that we have lost. Firstly, as discussed before we need to eradicate the habit of being critical. Secondly, retrieving our values, we must stop telling lies with one another, we should be truthful in our dealings, we must know that no one but we ourselves are responsible for our happenings, we need to develop the sense of forgetting and forgiving. We must ensure one another by our actions and deeds that we belong to same class of Humans. No matter, what is your religion, skin colour or country, we share equal human rights.
Hence, the plant of peace can be potted in one word of “understanding” consisting of little seeds which when sowed in the pot results in a healthy green plant. Elbert Einstein said:
“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
Our ideas, our practicality and we ourselves can make a difference. We can build peace in our minds and hearts and we will.