Love and Peace

Transcript

I was thinking about the phrase peace and love.

What happened the other night I was riding my bicycle around the city. I went near the market riding around looking for a place to put the bike and I passed through a few cars.

I didn’t notice at the time but there’s this large vehicle in front of me snaking my way around through the streets as we do on bikes and just as I am moving towards this large vehicle a fellow opens the door and gets out and starts looking angrily at the person in the vehicle behind me.

And he says “Amor y paz; amor y paz hermano!”

Love and peace, love and peace brother.

The angry fellow in front of me was basically like “¿Qué pasa con este bip bip bip?”

Why are you beeping at me so much?

It was obvious by the way he responded that he had already settled down significantly like his anger, even though he was still steaming his anger had been halved by the fact the fellow showed he had no ill will, he didn’t want to get into a fight. So he settled down.

It was a tense situation especially cause its kind of odd cause here I am almost directly in front of the two. If it had gone differently I might find myself as mediator or decide to be mediator. It didn’t come to it at all because the fellow who had apparently been the instigator in some sense trying to move and get home as quickly as he could beeping at this other fellow.

But no he quickly settled the situation down.

I wondered about that. I was moved in that moment because I thought how easy is it to ease the tensions? How easy is it to settle down a situation? How easy is it to back down, humble ourselves and say “I don’t want to fight, I would prefer that we be peaceful”

Just with communicating that idea all but the most determined will be relaxed. Many people will be pacified as soon as we show we are not looking to cause trouble when we communicating our good intentions.

Of course that will not always be the case but maybe, maybe most of the time it will be. I took that as a good omen, how easy it would have been if the fellow behind me was more frustrated. Had a bad day or had some pent up rage and felt like subjecting himself to it. How easy for that to go very differently. That’s not what happened.

In my heart I said this means that humanity is becoming more conscious. Recently reading the book by Stephen Pinker it’s called Better Angels of Our Nature and you can see there’s a great ted talk he did about it talking about how the decline of violence over the course of civilization. If you don’t want to read the book that’s ok, I am about twenty percent in and its quite a long book.

You can watch the ted talk, I invite you to watch that. And you can see that over time people hate violence more. People love peace more.

There was a point in history where people would fly off the handle for the concept of honor or glory or reasonable deterrent. People would kill, become enraged and pick up a bottle or whatever at hand and kill because of a slight against their honor.

For what we describe today as childish immature masculine ego. That once upon a time in the Middle Ages was commonplace. Now what can we see? Love and peace if we look for it. If we continue to encourage it.

Find it within ourselves and spread it to our brothers and sisters in this world. Love and peace.