By accident, I stumbled upon a YouTube video. Well, I doubt many things are accidental on the interweb these days. A single click—yes, by accident—can determine the future of your mind. One kitty video is all it takes to flood your inner reality with fur and feline tendencies, and suddenly, you’re a virtual cat person.
Now that I am about to name the video recommended by YouTube, I’m feeling suitably vulnerable, like my insides are coming out. We live in an age of exposure, and I’m a big girl, so I’ll survive. It’s not that terrible, really. After 30, as the comedienne Ali Wong says, your mental consumption hovers alarmingly in the self-help region. By that point—and I can confirm this although 30 has long left me—enough of life has seeped through your pores to plant a suspicion inside your head: maybe this thing I’ve been doing again and again, and again, is not bringing me the thing I thought it would bring me. Basically, I’m not happy and how can I please get some of that happiness rumoured to exist because I don’t think I can subscribe to nihilist notions of being in the world.
Just give me some mediocre happiness. Eating popcorn in a dark, freezing cinema with two cozy sweaters and a giant cup of Coke. Ordinary. Very ordinary.
I can hear the chattering of your mind: why is she delaying the great reveal?
The deferral is nothing mysterious or profound. Just a bit of good old-fashioned procrastination which I believe is a sign of self-sabotage but I’m not here to psychoanalyse myself for public ingestion. I’m just here to disclose that one day, not long ago, YouTube recommended a video named “Choosing Peace”, and I chose it, the video and potentially also, peace. I think it was the simplicity of the title that arrested me and flung me into one of the most straightforward discourses on human happiness I’d heard in a while and because of its apparent easiness, I found it dizzyingly complicated.
What was the essential kernel of this philosophy, you ask?
Choose peace.
When the Uncle in front of you is driving at 10 kilometres per hour, choose peace. When the punk behind is tailgating you (the punk turns out to be a middle-aged man in a chequered shirt with neatly combed hair and he looks like Mr. Lopez the nice neighbour who used to give you Ais Krim Malaysia and Hudson wild cherry sweets as a child), choose peace. In fact, superimposing the image of Mr. Lopez onto the tailgating punk is probably an effective strategy in choosing peace over deliberately slowing down your car to increase the punk’s blood pressure, and by extension, your own.
When your mother informs you that your hair is indeed resembling barbed wire now that you have changed shampoos, choose peace.
Then, when she returns to you 2 hours later to tell you that your eyes have become the colour of the paya bakau behind the house and that it’s most likely because you have an undiagnosed disease, choose peace. How? You could consider her words to be mere sounds, much like bird tweets are little noises in your ears. So, mother’s words are little noises too. If that doesn’t work, maybe excuse yourself from the premises and get yourself an Ais Krim Malaysia (though I haven’t seen these in ages; there must be an updated version somewhere in the country or else just get a Top Ten or Split).
When a woman spits in your face, for reasons unknown to you, choose peace.
It’s said that Gandhi blessed his assassin at the scene of his death.
I would love to choose peace every time mainly because I have this vision of myself floating over fields with a foolish, electrified smile on my face: not just happy, but deeply okay. I’d wave my profound okayness across highways, stinky alleyways, and in the faces of the disgruntled until they too get infected with this overpowering okayness.
The problem is I tend to forget to choose peace. And then, when I remember, I choose peace and I find myself filling up with the residue of hot emotions from having chosen peace. You know the type of emotion I’m referring to…those delicious spikes of anger, sadness, maybe even grief. And then, the peace turns into the type of peace that appears on the faces of murderers as they’re recounting the details of their acts.
The good news is I don’t feel too hopeless about this.
My main discovery— and hence this bold act of narcissism in writing a whole blogpost on inner turmoil—is that most of the time, several steps separate the primary irritation from that point of choosing peace. There are those one-off moments when choosing peace happens and takes effect instantly (as does levitation). But, the rest of the time, there are pathways, oftentimes convoluted and subject to acute experimentation, that form adventures towards that peace. My biggest discovery though is that the instant version isn’t the only way choice is made. A choice is a choice. An equally potent choice transpires when it’s about getting onto that pathway in the first place, even if it takes you through rocky terrain with high, breath-depriving altitudes. 20 minutes or 20 years later, there might be a descent from Everest levels to Fraser’s Hill levels (please excuse my simplistic thinking).
For me, the importance in seeing the dimensions, contours and shape of this geography of conflict and peace lies in the arrival of peace without the suppression of real, pulsating emotion. No peace is possible with the denial of what’s in the way of that peace.
So, yes, I choose peace and what is possible in the moment of choosing it depends on the heat, flavour and density of the soup of my psyche and hopefully, it’s not too thick to make me forget that choice is possible, that peace is a decision.
To end, the picture I’m attaching to this piece is of me in Rishikesh, India, when the environment itself gave me the natural intelligence to choose peace quite easily, and to remain there. I just need to keep remembering to stay put.