Retitle this Post as a more objectively valid starting point as What is Peace.
ZAP1 What is Peace? - previously A good place to start Learning
Peace 'grows on us' through our lives.
Most of us 'like' it, but as with many other intangible things it has no simple definition.
Words and symbols for Peace have been in use for a long time. Today's English word peace first came into use around 1300DC, derived from the earlier Anglo-Norman pas meaning 'freedom from disorder', or 'orderliness'
What does the word mean today?
Today the word has widely different meanings in different places, for different individuals and at different stages in their lives.
Young children tend to think of peace as something that's special for themselves - a pleasurable event or activity or a feeling of safety and harmony in their immediate surroundings.
Different adults may come to recognise peace as a social condition that meets human needs, a state of harmony in human relationships, a condition that's spiritual, or an elusive ideal.
Some though may see peace as an opposite to something they dislike - the opposite for example to loneliness, poverty or violence.
Others may come to see that peace also involves justice, the fostering of harmony among diverse groups and the resolving of conflicts.
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So WHERE and WHAT is peace?
Those examples suggest the peace we experience could have special locations - for example likes and dislikes that are held within ourselves, and relationships that extend outside ourselves.
They also suggest that peace may have, or lack, or perhaps combine significant components in ways that make it a more or less good peace.
In that way them the examples generate at least four ideas for thinking about peace and for understanding peace more deeply.
Descriptive names for those ideas include inner peace, an outer embracing social peace, a higher quality positive peace and a negative peace of lower quality.
For the avoidance of doubt, and especially if that shatters your personal beautiful and cherished vision of an unbreakable Peace, please know that those ideas can both sit comfortably and add valuably to other visions.
Looking inside Peace
So for different people and at different times 'peace' means an activity, condition, event, feeling, ideal, opposite, orderliness, social harmony and perhaps other things.
Its importance has attracted closer attention since the 20th century World Wars. That's resulted in new ways of thinking about peace and in a deeper understanding of war, its causes and clear possibilities for avoiding warfare.
Even so, lack of a definition for peace remains acknowledged as a problem even academics and professional researchers.
"Clarifying what Peace means is critical to improving it. Peace is too important a goal to be without a firm conceptual basis for research and action." From 'Measuring Peace', Richard Caplan, 2019.
What is known about peace is being used to resolve problems and improve life in communities afflicted by the aftermath of conflict and warfare.
What is less realised is that what is known can also enable us to improve life in much less afflicted and even 'normal' communities.
The Woodbridge Trees for Peace and this site are here to interest, engage and and guide more of us in that the search for a future that is better and more resilient to the fallout fromafflictions .
Find more in other Posts on this site: for example more about Peace, its origin, how it might grow, and other places where you can learn even furthe.
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