Confessions of a Recovering A**hole

Recently, I had a call with Tzofnat Peleg-Baker, Ph.D., an applied social psychologist specializing in the cultural and social dynamics that hinder dialogue and collaborative decision-making.

While we were discussing the overlap in our work, and how hard it is to hold all the violence and polarization all around us, she said something so clear, and in retrospect, so obvious that I was chagrined that I hadn't thought of it myself. She said,

"Peace is harder than war."

That completely stopped me in my tracks and kind of reset my brain.

It reminds me of the observation that it takes a long time to create something meaningful, but only a moment to destroy it.

It also brings to mind one of my favorite sayings, by Viktor Frankl, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness."

When someone with power experiences a stimulus toward war, and does not take the time to inhabit that open space of freedom and power to truly choose their response, but rather reacts with mass violence, we suffer the consequences of that ensuing war. Albert Einstein once called war a "failure of imagination."

If violence, polarization and war, then, stem from unexamined reactions rather than reasoned, deliberate responses, this rounds out Tzofnat's observation that peace is harder than war. Peace requires what Dr. Resmaa Menakem often reminds his students of: the pause — the pause in which we can interrupt well-worn neural pathways from stimulus to response that put us into reaction patterns that fuel polarization, violence, and war.

That pause opens up possibilities; allows for reorganization of trauma-induced reactions into peace-choosing responses; and helps us get a new perspective on reality.

Without the pause, and the somatic (embodied) skills to reflect on our range of choices, those reaction patterns typically repeat themselves.

They repeat themselves because they got laid down when we were learning to survive less-than-optimal childhoods. They got reinforced when we used them again and again, not realizing that we had other choices, let alone getting help to practice using those new choices.

What if the reason that peace is harder than war were that some part of each of us still believes that slowing down, pausing, and widening the field of response possibilities poses an existential threat?

And what if knowing this and attending to it could make peace a whole lot easier to choose?

And if that's the case, shall we not teach these skills from kindergarten onward in preservation of life on earth as we know it? And support those in power to exercise that awareness in the service of peace as a fundamental value?

At some point, with enough of us practicing these methods, peace must become the prevailing way of the world, yes?