Pursuit Of Peace

 Yesterday was my 32nd birthday. I woke up seeing birthday wishes from my friends, my family, texts and social media messages hoping I have a great day, and I felt overcome with a feeling of gratitude. 

Every year I would usually get that kind of response for my birthday, but this one felt different. 

I spent years before completely shutting myself away for my birthdays. The day would come and go, and you would either get through to me by the end of the day or not at all. I would try to hide away from the world entirely. I look back on those years and think it was to see who cared about me. I never made a fuss for my birthdays cause I never really held any value for myself.  I wasn't in the best place, and I wasn't happy with where I was in my life. I woke up yesterday and had a conversation with my closest friend. We spoke about the fact that our happiness requires less effort nowadays. We joked on it being our age and spoke on how much peace we are searching for in our lives. 

When I speak about peace, I'm talking about complete comfort and acceptance of one's self. I'm talking about fulfillment at a higher level than just social status. In fact; I'm not talking about social status at all. 

When you take out what society requires of you, what is it that you want for yourself?

 As much as we think it isn't, life is simple. Life, to me, is about feeling and loving every moment that comes with the journey you are undertaking. That can include negative moments, that can consist of moments of feeling lost, but you have to feel and love those moments also because they are apart of the journey you are experiencing to allow you to become a better person. Life is also about progression. I had a conversation with my son in regards to the life we are living. I told him never allow yourself to be trapped in an environment you cannot adjust to. 

Never dwell on the feeling of wanting something to be a certain way and stopping yourself from adapting to achieve it because of preference. Never be one dimensional. 

A versatile individual is an extraordinary attribute to have in this day and age. The Pandemic we are all enduring at this very moment is a perfect example of that. There have been a lot of people who have found it hard to adjust to the changes happening and allowing a negative situation to make them become negative people. They are showing an aggressive or dysfunctional side of themselves because they are struggling to adjust to changes. When changes harm your personality, at times, it shows that you are not ready to challenge yourself to progress. It shows that you would rather be a shark in a fish tank than be a dolphin in the ocean. You would rather the destruction you have know for years and come to accept than the peace you could acquire and flourish in. We all reach a ceiling in life where we feel we have used as much energy as we can in certain aspects of our lives to get to where we are, but there's always something deeper inside of us that would allow us to break the ceiling. We celebrate birthdays. 10th, 20th, 30th birthdays but we are thousand of years old. We are our ancestors we have DNA strands in us linked to people from thousands of year ago and that in itself should show you never to stop searching for peace. Never stop wanting to find that value in yourself cause if they stopped, we wouldn't exist. 

If someone tells you, they don't want things to be easy in life they're lying to you. Everyone wants things to be easy for them, but some are willing to go through the hardships to reach that place. Challenges build character and separate the strong-minded from the weak. Everyone has a different perception of success, and I think nowadays society is trying to streamline what success is to abuse the masses for their means,   but that's another post for another day. This post is about encouraging people never to stop looking for peace. Never stop looking for what could bring a sense of completion in your life. Never stop allowing yourself to grow into the person that you most desire to be. Change with the seasons, adapt and flourish. Nurture your spirit, feed your soul what's right for you not what you think you need but what makes you happy.