I’ve been looking for a quote to inspire me. I’ve been troubled and my boggled mind is not proving to be a good place to sooth my troubled soul.
In my mind there is a war raging and all I want is peace. It is precisely that desire that has caused the war.
I am self righteous and can get my wheels stuck easily when I am trying to fix a perceived wrong, or wrong doer. My wheels are up to the lug nuts in self righteous mud.
How do you find inner peace and simultaneously walk away from a battle that means something to you?
How do you experience inner peace when you can see the battle, even if you believe you’ve nothing left to add to the fight?
Which of the instincts is the one I should follow?
There’s a fable (I suppose that’s what it is – correct me if I’m wrong) that tells about a man walking the beach at low tide and tossing the stranded starfish into the ocean. A boy observes for a while and then catches up with the man and asks what he is doing. The man replies that he’s throwing the starfish back in the water. The boy looks the length of the beach and imagines the number of stranded starfish and says ‘but you can’t save them all, what a waste of time’. The man tosses another in the water and replies “saved that one”.
So, the mental image of this I see a man at peace, not consumed by the fact he will never save all the starfish from the heat of the sun, who is content to do what he can. I don’t imagine him stressing over how many starfish will line the beach the next day or what will happen if he doesn’t make it to the beach or trying to conceive of ways to save more of the creatures or even trying to band people together to “Save The StarFish”. No, he is content to do his part. He’s not obsessed. This is simply what he ‘does’.
To what lengths would the man go to do this? Would he go on a stormy day and get cold and wet and be beaten back by the wind? Would he go if there were others who were throwing the starfish back on the beach, if the act of saving “that one” became futile, if it became a fight would he still do it?
This is my delima. I can’t save the world, I don’t even know if the fight is worth fighting in the bigger picture. Perhaps I’ve already saved enough of “them” to make the difference that needed to be made or that I wanted to make.
Is it time to “let it go”? Or is it time to accept that the fight that I feel driven to fight is the road that I’m supposed to be on just as the man has accepted his contributions as just what he ‘does’.
I haven’t yet found the wisdom that will make it an easy decision but I know I have to make one.
So here I sit, idling. Mud is everywhere – I can’t even see out the windows. Now what? Hit the gas and make the mud fly – or get out and walk away.