Simmonds-Upton: Scribbler

Peace can be a truly elusive thing. For once, I’m not talking or about peace between nations or peoples but personal peace. We struggle to find it in general these days. Modern life doesn’t seem to lend itself to a peaceful or calm existence, least of all in a country where what modicum of peace we can find is often punctuated by air raid sirens and bombings.

But in general, peace is hard to find. The layers of life confound and frustrate our attempts to find peace. The endless need for money. The need for employment. The need for stability. The pressures of rent, of bills, of work, of motivation. The general pressures of modern life in a late capitalist world seem almost a conspire against our personal peace.

Much of my life has been this struggle to find peace. I haven’t always realised it, but truly I think that’s the root of what I as a person and I think indeed many struggle to find. Multiple times I thought I found my peace, but always life seems to find a way to frustrate it, to disrupt it, to violate it.

So we search for peace, however we can. Some find it in a drink, some in a lovers’ embrace. Some curled up on the couch with a cat, others in solitude. Today, while stressing over the complexities of setting up a business in Ukraine, wrestling with doubts over how far to back myself, how much to put on the line for the ambition and drive to truly be self-dependent and self-employed, I was lacking in peace once again.

I found it tonight standing on my balcony, cup of tea in hand, listening to a playlist that YouTube had randomly put on, gazing at the rain dripping around a street light. This was a moment of peace not profound, nor unique, nor – most unfortunately – lasting. Yet it was a moment of peace nonetheless. The sound of the rain barely audible over the music, the dark, the smell. There was a tranquility there.

I have been struggling greatly to write of late. Anyone who reads this blog regularly, I’m sure there may be 1 or 2 of you, will see this. This National Novel Writing Month, I have written barely 3000 words, most of those in anger. I find it hard to write from peace. I find inspiration and motivation in a kind of all-consuming passion. A passion which strikes me rarely. Without some spark of inspiration, be it anger, frustration, or self-recrimination, I struggle to progress any form of creative endeavour.

Tonight, however, I write from peace. Inspired by something truly mundane: rain dripping down on and around a street light. This is unlike my usual writing. It’s unlike my usual inspiration. But it’s something I hope to remember and that’s why I put it to the page tonight.

Usually my call to action the end of my pieces is something grand: to resist to, fight, to campaign. That we cannot give up in the face of some grand peril or injustice. Today I end with a much more simple call to action, and that is a call to inaction. A call to find a moment like this. To find a moment of peace in an unpeaceful world. No matter how hard or distant or even sometimes impossible that may seem.

I wish you luck in finding it.

P.S. expect a return to angry polemics just as soon as someone/thing causes me great frustration and ruins my peace. No doubt it shall be soon