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An ode to silence, and peace

"Seek peace, and pursue it" is an injunction from the Good Book. It was, I gather, something King David once said. And who better to wish for it, given his tumultuous life. There was after all, Goliath, Bathsheba and the killing on the front lines of her husband, his 'noisy neighbours' and the odd visiting prophet or two who called around to upbraid him.

Truth to tell, I feel a little like David, what with morning after the Cricket World Cup, thunderings and flying faeces about and at old Cecil Rhodes, doom and gloom about the Eskom-centred economy, and so forth and so on.

How about a little peace and quiet? To be able to read a book without wondering at the allure of emigration to a country where snowfall is an event, or a giant glacier moving is an excitement. To be able to think and talk about art, an interesting idea still in the abstract, or the adventures into the unknown of a faraway and inconsequential personage whose success or failure is of little consequence to us in the here-and-now. You get the drift.

The lesson I guess, is to be like David, to yearn for, seek, and then having run hard in pursuit of it, to find peace, whatever is going on around us. May be then, like the deeply flawed King, we too can be called people after God's own heart. How can we be, when we will not, cannot, and do not, seek peace? 

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