Discover Inner Peace
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.”
Abraham Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970)
No amount of fame and fortune will satisfy you if you aren’t doing what you really want to. The trick is to discover this for yourself, because no one else can tell you. People may be able to point in the right direction, but they are few and far between. Most of the time, they will try to guide you to what they think is best.
This isn’t bad news, however, because you can learn something from both types of people. For those who truly have your best interest in mind and know you well enough, it is obvious how they can show you something you might have missed. These people are generally mentors, teachers, and coaches in your life.
Other people may want you to be happy, but it is their idea of happiness.
For most of us, our family members are a good example of this. It isn’t that they want you to be miserable, far from it in fact. But they think they know what is best for you, and only you can know this. They are merely guiding you the best that they are able to at the time, with the consciousness that they possess.
The good news is that with these types of people, they may not be leading you towards your personal dreams, but they are indirectly. By this I mean sometimes it takes knowing what you don’t want, to learn what you truly do want. This reality we live in is based on opposites: up/down, light/dark, hot/cold, etc. To know one, is to indirectly know the other. The secret is to know this, and always fall back to what you think is right for yourself, and not allow yourself to be lead unconsciously.
When you do this, you will be at peace with yourself. It doesn’t matter what path you decide to follow, whether that be a musician, artist, writer, or any other line of work. Abraham Maslow makes it sound like perhaps the only way you will find happiness is to find some grand career, and this quote is romanticized a bit. But it makes no difference what type of vocation you find yourself doing, as long as you picked it for yourself.
We often think that society imposes itself on us, and we don’t have free will. This is because so few of us follow this inner calling and instead settle for less. There is also another stereotype that we need to be rich and famous to be at peace. True, there are a few people in the world doing this, but more often than not those people we envy are just as unhappy as us, if not more so. Think of all the young actors and musicians we see on the media who are seemingly wasting their talent and lives. They are either overusing drugs and alcohol to escape, or finding some other criminal activity.
On the converse side, I have met, and I’m sure you have as well, people who are doing the most trivial jobs that are completely content with themselves and their lives. These people are a true inspiration, because they learned to find peace with what they want to do, and are quietly thriving. Think for a moment if you know someone like this…
They rarely complain, and seem to be happy for no good reason. Perhaps you even pitied them when you first met them because of their outward circumstances. Then you got to know them, and realized they are better off than you are. If you could trade places with them, you would in a heartbeat. Even knowing they have far less than you, they are much happier. If you have traveled to a “third world” country, it is even more likely you know exactly what I’m talking about.
They love what they do, and aren’t stressing themselves out by wishing they were someone else. They appreciate what they have, instead of perpetually wanting more. This is how you find peace–no amount of material success of wealth will ever satisfy you without a shift in attitude. But you have to be willing to listen to your intuition, and follow what is right for you. Self-reflection is the only way to determine this.
Think about your life right now--are you doing what makes you happy? Or are you living the life someone else wants you to lead? Perhaps you are the CEO of a major corporation, making an exorbitant salary, with every toy imaginable. But if you aren’t following that soft whisper of a dream that has likely been with you since childhood, you aren’t at peace.
Take some time to reset if you can. Travel to break up the routines in your life. If you have been moving from one thing to another your entire life as most people have, it’s likely you’ve never really thought about what you want. Perhaps instead of being a CEO, you would be much happier selling tomatoes at a roadside stand in Thailand. This might sound ridiculous, but it is certainly possible, and just one example of many.
Life makes so much more sense when we know ourselves, but especially in the Western world, we rarely take time to reflect. Instead it is one accomplishment after another, until we reach a mid-life crisis, and we realize we’ve been going through life completely unconscious. It doesn’t matter how much knowledge, talent, money, or even health we have if we aren’t at peace. It is only when we find “Heaven” within, that paradoxically we will discover it outside ourselves.