It’s our responsibility to protect our peace. It’s not our spouse’s job. It’s not our therapist’s job. It’s not our pastor’s job. It’s our job because we’re the only ones that can do it. When we start looking for comfort outside of ourselves is when we can get into trouble. Sometimes though, we do find we need a bit of something to lean on while we pick ourselves back up off the floor once again. But, if what we’re leaning on becomes what we think we have to have for our peace, it’s time to let it go.

I’m not a drinker. My father was an alcoholic. I’m not a gambler, it’s just not my thing. I don’t do drugs, because I don’t like spending my life looking over my shoulder and I don’t enjoy being high. I’ve got control issues. My crutch of choice, and it was a conscious choice after assessing the alternatives, was smoking cigarettes. They had one major advantage, I was less likely to say things I would regret when furiously puffing. I don’t currently smoke, it’s not a celebratory victory over addiction because I was never really addicted to nicotine. I don’t smoke because I no longer need the crutch. Smoking didn’t help me protect my peace but it helped me stay standing so that I could learn how to protect my peace.

Protecting my peace is a complicated business. It involves boundaries and acceptance, along with paying attention to my patterns. The patterns part was what I got to after the boundaries and acceptance. It has been the most fruitful area for growth. Granted, I’m still working on all of them and will be until I’m done here. I spend a lot of time working on these because without my peace I make decisions that are often misaligned with who I am and where I want to walk. Not only can those decisions be dragging me off course, but they also work against me and in favor of others.

Every day, marketers, politicians, well-meaning aunts, and not so well-meaning frenemies, attempt to influence our choices. Most of these are far from nefarious and most are obvious. The bakery venting into the grocery store is one of the famous ones that’s trying to get us to buy some tasty bread that we hadn’t planned on buying. The car salesman working to convince us that we really wanted the car in orange instead of black (because that model in orange has been on the the lot for months), while irritating, is not too endangering if we can keep our wits about us. Some attempts to influence us can have real consequences for our lives. Those who are trying to change our minds, beliefs, or actions, do not have any concern for our well-being. They are simply following their own agenda.

Protecting our peace, is also protecting our autonomy. If we look to someone else like: politicians, religious leaders, or celebrities, for our peace, we can lose sight of who we are. If someone is trying to create fear in us, they are attempting to manipulate us in order to destroy our emotional and mental balance. We won’t make good choices for us in that state. We will respond in emotion and those responses can last a very long time.

A long time ago, I was in Basic Training in the military. Knocking people off balance in order to change responses to stimuli was the majority of the instructors’ method in training new recruits. They used screaming in our faces, created random inspections, gave unpredictable responses, caused sleep deprivation, made unreasonable demands, and used name calling, as standard parts of a repertoire designed to create states in recruits where new emotional and mental patterns could be created to overlay the existing patterns. They applied these across the group in order to create standardized responses. It worked. It was, and is, reliably the way to mold behavior.

There are many in society that will attempt to mold our thoughts and behavior. Our greatest line of self defense is to understand who we are, and the patterns that can put us off-balance. If we can keep our balance by protecting our peace, we are much more likely to make choices and decisions that are within alignment to who we are. If we know ourselves it’s much harder to be manipulated. Protecting our peace is really protecting ourselves.