What is peace?

Words by Sazi Ndwandwa.

I'm an accountant. I'm a coach.
There's no contradiction. They're the same.

I asked a friend of mine. What is peace? He said it's a feeling. Describe it, I said. He did. I could hear his words, but I could not define it. What is joy and how does it relate to peace? What do we want that we may say we have wellbeing? Joy and peace, I think. To feel good and to not feel bad. Is that joy and peace?

Let's look at some synonyms for joy. Happy, fun, feeling good, ecstatic
Peace. At ease, calm, serene, tranquil.

Let's look at some antonyms for joy. Sad, anguish, downhearted, miserable.
For peace - anxious, afraid, disturbed, flustered, troubled.

I think that helps, defining a thing through the knowledge of its absence and of its relatives. How does that relate to people, I wonder? A thought for another day.

So, I said. What if?
What if your wellbeing is an income statement?
All the good stuff coming in is the joy. It makes you wealthier as a person. Emotionally. The more joy, fun, excitement and ecstacy you have in your life, the richer you are.

And the stuff going out? Your emotional spending? Feeling afraid, anxious, no peace.

I guess, your emotional wellbeing may be just a matter of which outweighs the other. Do you have more joy coming in and less peace being depleted?

I am viewing peace as something that can only be lost and not gained - something to be protected. Bear with me. And joy as something that can only be gained and not lost - something to be pursued.

Any person, household or business has to earn money to live. We must pursue joy and add to our emotional bank account.

All of us have expenses that deplete our bank accounts. Some we feel are necessary and some are luxuries and the rest are carelessness. We expend emotions worrying about our children, families and our work thinking it is necessary. We spend our peace hanging out with people around whom we feel inadequate, a luxury. We waste our peace in traffic, shouting at people we don’t know and who can’t hear us.

If you make more than you spend, consistently over time, you become richer and richer and richer. If you make less than you spend, poverty.

We all know that some things bring more money than others. The salary might bring more money than your side hustle. Some of us have very limited ways of getting joy.

Maybe we only like reading or hanging out with friends or learning new things. We don’t understand people who have multiple emotional income streams.

They are in property, hiking this and that mountain; entertainment, going out with friends. They get more joy from one than the other, but still its emotional income.

In the same way, some things cost more peace than others. We may spend on guilt and keeping secrets, a huge bond to live under. We spend on insecurity, an expensive garment. We spend on heavy chains around our neck trying to look good in front of everyone.

At the end of the day, the bank account is always keeping tabs. We may try to ignore or deny it. But sooner or later if we are bankrupt we won’t be able to buy anything. If we have lost too much peace we can’t find joy in anything.

We may keep trying to make more and more money to keep up with our expenses, but if our expenses are too many or too big we are bound to find ourselves emotionally broke.

So, what do we want?
We want to have money and we want to invest our peace in things that will bring us joy. We don't want to spend our emotions on things that have no good emotional return.

We don’t want to do things that get us into emotional debt, always bearing interest adding pain to worry. Doing things that, when found out break our families, put us in prison.

This, is an accountant explaining joy and peace, income and expenses. What you owe and what you own?

Pursue joy and protect your peace fam.