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Scheduled for Mar 5 at 2:16 pm

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It’s difficult for me to talk about a world at peace. Partly, maybe, because I don’t know if it’s a real thing to be valued. Can it even be a thing? Can we even wish for this in good faith?

I know for sure it can be a chosen “top five” value, because it’s one of mine.

That doesn’t mean I believe in it. Or that I understand it. Or that I can write about it with any measure of eloquence.

The first year I was married the dishwasher we had was a piece of crap. It was second hand and built in about 1996. It was a dishwasher, but it wasn’t a good one.

One of the things I found frustrating about the dishwasher was that the drawer wheels were sticky and always caught. You’d try to pull it out and unless it was aligned juuuust right it’d just stay locked in there.

Also we had a small house and it felt like I was always kicking the open door on accident and banging up my ankles.

Plus, (and this cannot be overstated), I was a newlywed and still processing childhood rage really inefficiently. My life was changing dramatically and while the changes were overwhelmingly for the better, they were still difficult transitional times for both my wife and for me. We were so young, and so unprepared. Maybe that’s always the story.

One night, I do not remember why, perhaps my wife or my best buddy who was living with us at the time could remember, I was hopping mad about something. I was stomping around the house and making my displeasure widely known, as I am wont to do.

When it was time for me to interact with the dishwasher and the drawer inevitably locked up on me for the 900th time, I lost my cool. I grabbed both drawers and ripped them out of the machine with a powerful force. I stomped through the house to the front door and threw them as hard as I could out into the driveway.

The effect this must’ve had on my partner, I cannot even imagine. You’d have to know her, know her parents and her upbringing to realize how jarring and awful this behavior must have been for her to witness. She knew I was strong, and powerful. I don’t know if she knew I could be awful.

I am no stranger to rage. I am no stranger to violence.

Once I slammed a door so hard it split the doorframe. The door never closed correctly after that. Our actions have consequences.

One time in 2001, (I was twenty full years old), in the days before I was married, my nerdy brother and I went to a midnight showing of Lord of The Rings. We took a couple of his little buddies with us. Those movies were long! So by the time we were driving north on the freeway toward our home we were all exhausted and it had to have been 3:00 in the morning.

Sitting in the passenger seat of my mom’s Toyota Corolla I adjusted the heat. Sitting in the driver’s seat, he adjusted it back. I adjusted. He adjusted again and so I reared back and punched him in the shoulder as hard as I could. While he was driving. At 3am and at freeway speeds. With someone else’s sons in the back seat.

He swung back, swerving the car into the fast lane, and we took turns exchanging blows in the moving vehicle.

He stopped the car and we got out and we wordlessly drew blood from one another on the side of the freeway while our friends wept in fear in the back seat of the car. Eventually tiring out, we returned to the freeway and finished our journey home.

A mildly amusing anecdote to tell today, particularly with the backdrop of the extreme warmth and affection I share with my brother now.

But the nuts & bolts of that story are of needless, unwarranted violence. My brother drove the car. I drove the violence. It was not in his nature.

I am no stranger to violence.

The card says A world at peace, and then at the bottom it summarizes the concept, Free of war and conflict.

And this world is not free. It’s not free of war or conflict. In my first writings about a world at peace I meandered softly from World War II through to Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. These are conflicts I do not understand. I have strong feelings about them, but I do not pretend to know all of the factors that precipitated the conflicts, nor do I know how we might find our collective way out of them. It’s tempting to go on a raging rant, here, now, about war. It’s honestly the word I connect with first on the card. War is hell. War is hell from the outside. How much more must it be from within?

My grandfathers both fought in the Korean War. I thanked one for his service before he died. I remember how confused he sounded on the phone. I imagine now, knowing a little more about him, that he was deeply conflicted about his involvement.

Instead I will focus on peace & conflict. Because as a coffee roaster, a dad, a husband, a guy who likes this values exercise I’m doing, I think I can have an effect on these things. I can work toward peace in my life, and I can work against conflict in my life, and anyway, the end of all of my writings on this subject have been “It begins inside of us”, which I think is how this one will end as well.

I am natively a man of violent tendencies, as described above. There are many other things I’ve done and said over the years that could add to these proofs. Most people who know me well or especially who’ve known me since I was young can remember a time when my violence has caught them off guard.

To be honest, I’m aging out of some of those tendencies. I can feel it within myself. It’s partly because of choices I’m making, choices toward peace. Choices that supersede and circumvent my baser violence. And it’s partly the wake of broken relationships I see behind me. And it’s partly just getting older. Maybe a little wiser.

Thankfully my violence toward the dishwasher and my brother on the freeway are among my only stories of physical violence. But my words have wounded many people over the years. And my thoughts have, at times, been very dark indeed.

I am the father of a child who’s not mine. It’s a long story and not one I’ll tell here. Suffice it to say I have a deep well of love for a child not born to me.

In my love for them, in my darkest moments, I harbor thoughts of violence toward their biological dad based on his behaviors and choices. I feel violence toward their grandfather. I would betray my value for a world at peace, and it’s only discipline and age and breathing techniques and the good friendship I enjoy with my wife that brings me to a place of calm and rationality. Hurt people hurt people, even children. Even their own children.

Conflict. It’s like violence-lite. Or maybe it’s the precursor to violence. To a lack of peaceable relations between people.

Today, I am an immigrant to peacemaking. And as my dad used to say, there’s no patriot like an immigrant. People who choose a thing are almost always more committed than those who come to it naturally.

May it be so for me. May it be so for us all.

So, as promised, this essay ends the way my other attempts have ended. A world at peace starts within us I think. It starts with us choosing not to rip the dishwasher apart because you’re angry at life’s little circumstances. It starts with choosing love and deference for all as a matter of course and not as a last resort.

Maybe I’m a peacenik. Maybe I’d be a conscientious objector. I do admire people who stand on a conviction bent on peace very much. I could name names. Floyd Schrock. Wendell Berry.

It starts within us. Observing our own violence first, and eradicating it from our thoughts and motivations. Because we’re all something. We’re all moms and dads. We’re all coffee roasters or truckers or teachers or Presidents of the United States.

And we have to start there, right? We have to use our tools and our jobs and our relationships to promote peace and to thoughtfully reject violence in order for the world to be filled with it.

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