A Sense of Inner Peace

For the past few days my mind has been drifting to visions of the trees that were in the backyard of one of the houses my family used to live in.  When I was a teen, I used to find a sense of inner peace and comfort when I watched their leaves rustle with the wind.  Especially when it got a little stormy in the Colorado summer nights.  I used to open up the window from my room in the basement and let the cool wind blow in with its masqueraded feeling of sleeping outdoors.  I suppose in a way I felt connected with this portion of Nature and found some sort of meaning in its imaginary communication.

This morning I took an hour and a half jog, starting thirty minutes before the sunrise, and ending just shortly after the eastern sky became fully lit.  Silence around me, except for the iPod's "Body Blast" and "Get Busy" mixes motivating me to keep going, scenes of white picket fenced Cape Cod like compounds, horses, fields, and a portion of the western outskirts of the city passing before my eyes.  Mountain range in the distance, city lights still illuminated, a few cars passing here and there.  I'm sure they were thinking there goes another one of those runner fools, up at 5:30 am on a Saturday.  But this morning that run in the cool fall air was my source of inner peace.

Life can be so chaotic, with its obligations and demands.  We're always rushing to get something done, to get somewhere, to make a good enough impression.  We're also always looking for something we don't think we have, but want.  What will it be today?  Where can we take ourselves or how many things can we accumulate in order to show the world that we made our mark?  Some of us are never really satisfied and I include my restless soul in that bunch.  In seven weeks I'll have completed a master's degree and I'm not really sure I learned anything that I didn't already know before-at least from the textbooks.

A sense of inner peace and satisfaction can't be reached by focusing on what may lay ahead, what we've already left behind, or our imaginary worlds containing "the next best thing."  No, I think it comes from a silent voice that realizes that your intangible self and its breaths are all that you really have in life.  All that really matters is that you're allowing yourself to be you, no matter who that you might be.  Nature is content and calm with itself because it simply exists, each piece living out the role it was meant to play.  What we want from ourselves and from others has always been there inside our own souls.  The only thing we've forgotten how to do is express it from within rather than from fleeting external manifestations.    

As one of my favorite songs so beautifully states:  "send me no more angels on a restless wind.  All I ever wanted were the simple things.  If a love like ours means anything, show me a sign honey, dip your wings."