Finding peace

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about peace. I don’t mean peace like the opposite of war; I mean peace like inner calm (if there is such a thing), peace as contentment, like the opposite of a noisy brain.

My conclusion is that it’s weird that there’s no peace-oriented Western tradition to follow. There’s yoga; there’s meditation; but where’s the European tradition I can pick up on? I don’t want to chant things in a foreign language or focus on my third eye or imagine chakras. I want my head to feel a bit clearer, but adding poorly translated Sanskrit phrases to the list of things I think about doesn’t seem like a particularly reasonable way to go about this.

Maybe this is why Catholics say the rosary? Of course, I’m not Catholic either....

And so I sit here, my computer’s screen blank except for this text. Laptop on my lap, I stare into the white-ish glow, legs crossed under me, and I type. I take a sip of water. I backspace a word or two, sculpting paragraphs and sentences into shapes that please me.

And I wonder:

Maybe a Western contemplative tradition is something I could just invent?