Peace and goodwill for all, or any of it’s numerous variations, is one of the Christmas holiday season’s most popular messages. Yet, whatever of it actually comes to pass during the holiday season soon dissipates as things return to ‘normal’ for the vast majority of people. Why is it that what we as a society call ‘normal’ is so dysfunctional, so distressed, and so divided, that peace and goodwill on Earth can ever only be present for most people in the form of fleeting holiday sentiments?
The simple answer is that our priorities are skewed. Far too many things have taken on much greater importance than our core values. If you really contemplate this for a bit I think you’ll see that everything which occurs in this crazy world we live in which isn’t going in the direction of peace and goodwill for all, is in fact due to something else that seems more important for some reason. These self-perceived ‘more important things’ then cause our human caring part to be forced to ride in the back seat, perhaps even in the trunk, or worse yet to be tossed out altogether onto the curb!
While it’s a bit disconcerting that such a simple principle evades us despite all of the other advances we have made as a civilization, there’s a bit of good news in this too. This good news is that because it’s such a simple principle, there’s also a simple solution! It is, however, one which will indeed require some highly motivated persistence to successfully implement a longer term change.
There’s a first realization that we must have in order to make this change. This is how quite a bit of the peace and goodwill we might experience or extend to others during the holidays is largely due to a temporary behavioral modification being made, versus a deeper more permanent inner change. If you are someone who already experiences peace and goodwill with regularity, then this of course does not apply to you. In such a case this article may be able to help you help others learn to experience what you do.
Once you can entertain the possibility that your short-lived experiences of peace and goodwill to all during the holidays may be mostly due to a temporary behavioral change, you can then ask yourself how that temporary behavioral change can become an enduring ongoing life long experience. In the event you ask yourself that question and you come up empty, I’m offering you the following helpful tips which might also help to trigger something even better to appear upon your blank screen.
- Make a game of it whereby you pretend it’s the holidays all the time. Lots of possibilities for fun abound here! Santa hats, tinsel, peace and goodwill in July anyone?
- Take stock of your life… write down everything that seems more important than experiencing and extending peace and goodwill to all.
- Once you’ve done #2, for each item you’ve written down, ask yourself how you can put those less important things back into their rightful place whenever needed.
- Make a commitment to actually do what you’ve identified in #3… these are your actual solutions!
- Find ways of reminding yourself all day long, every day, about your solutions. The more reminders the better.
Here’s some further good news about doing this… if you do these things during the holidays when it’s easier to experience and express peace and goodwill to all, it will give you a REALLY powerful jump start on succeeding with it all year long too! Further, an attitude of ‘peace and goodwill to all’ is infectious, it can spread like a virus. Most people really love to be around a person with this type of attitude and start adopting it themselves. The holidays are a great time to spread this type of attitudinal virus… but don’t stop being infectious when the holidays end, keep spreading it far and wide!
May your heart, mind and being be filled with the ‘peace and goodwill for all’ virus now and always!