Start the Day 1 Let peace lead the way

Begin each day with time devoted to the preparation of your mind to learn what...that day can offer you in freedom and in peace. Open your mind, and clear it (W140/141, review IV intr 5)

The purpose of this next series of posts (which may never amount to more than this one) is to start the day 'in freedom and in peace'. If your day has already veered off track, it might encourage you to start the day again, now. The idea at this moment is that I will post a daily reminder (or weekly, or whenever I remember) for you and for myself to start the day right. If I forget or chase off after another rabbit, this Start the Day thought will still apply any day or time of day:

Let peace lead the way (W155)

We think of peace as passive. It is avoiding outright confrontation, it is a lull between fighting, it is roll over in submission, it is anything for a quiet life. At best, it may be appeasement, compromise, any negotiation that tentatively bridges our separate interests while we still believe they are separate.

But as the Course teaches it, peace is not a temporary condition of affairs, or even a state of mind. It is the reality that underlies the dream we live in. We can catch a feel of it in the space between thoughts, in the stillness at the heart of movement, in the silence behind sound. It does not exist in the world of form, because form is made up of contrasts and opposites, and there are no such contradictions in peace. Peace is neither 'out there' nor 'in here': it just is. It only seems to exist in relation to ourselves; in truth, when we remember peace, we no longer have selves, we are peace.

So just the thought of peace reorients the mind towards wholeness. When you start the day by looking forward to what it will bring, or by dreading what may happen, you have already started on the wrong foot. You are setting yourself up as an individual to whom things happen, or who makes things happen, whose choices are limited and whose experience of peace depends on circumstances. The moment you wake and remind yourself who you think you are, you are already constraining your mind to run along established paths, hedged by learned limitations, jumping at old fears, straining after imagined desires.

To decide, on waking, to 'let peace lead the way' is a conscious choice not to pre-judge or to narrow your experience of life. It is not the ebullient 'Seize the day!' of the ego seeking to shape life to suit itself. We cannot know what is best for us and for everyone, and the positive go-get-'em attitude that is popularly urged upon us these days is frequently more defiant than enlightened. As Blake said, 'He who bends to himself a joy Does the wingèd life destroy;' happiness is discovered rather than arranged.

Nor is an inward invitation to peace to lead the way for you today a kind of resignation, or apathy, or abdication of responsibility. On the contrary, it is an act of will. It is a decision to meet whatever the day unfolds, without fear or attack. It is an affirmation of trust. It frees your mind and lets inspiration and energy flow confidently into your thoughts and activities this very day. It makes room for miracles: in the Course's sense of a sudden shift of awareness, an opening up of possibilities, a transcendence of limitations.

To start your day thinking 'Let peace lead the way' is not to devoutly shoehorn yourself into some muted idea of whatever you suppose you ought to be and feel. When peace leads the way, you can scamper through your day like a dog off the leash. It's walkies time! You don't need to know where you are going or what time it is. Even when you digress this way and that way, you are keeping an eye (or nose) on your guide, so that your direction is not as random as it might sometimes look. To let peace lead the way is to imply that while there is a part of you that knows nothing, there is also a part you can rely on that you can trust to bring you safely home together.  

The mind engaged in planning for itself is occupied in setting up control of future happenings. It does not think that it will be provided for, unless it makes its own provisions. Time becomes a future emphasis, to be controlled by learning and experience obtained from past events and previous beliefs. It overlooks the present, for it rests on the idea the past has taught enough to let the mind direct its future course.

The mind that plans is thus refusing to allow for change. What it has learned before becomes the basis for its future goals. Its past experience directs its choice of what will happen. And it does not see that here and now is everything it needs to guarantee a future quite unlike the past, without a continuity of any old ideas and sick beliefs. Anticipation plays no part at all, for present confidence directs the way (W135 15)