Peace connects is the theme of the national peace week from 19 to 26 September. To convey that theme, the Walk of Wisdom organizes a Flame run with the world flame of peace and an ongoing Peace Vigil in the Valkhof Chapel. 

Peace connects – just like the struggle

Fantastic word: peace. In the same sacred team as love, health, happiness. I’ve never heard of anyone who was against it. Does peace still mean anything?

Peace strikes me as happiness or health – not something that exists on its own. You have moments of happiness, but happiness as such is only experienced in the circumstances: the immense satisfaction with a result achieved, the pleasure in an encounter that ‘clicks’, the deep rest after a vigorous physical effort. It’s no different with health: you feel fit or energetic; You’re not sick. Health is a sum that does not exist without its parts. 

Walk around in the Netherlands: no one will shoot you. No bomb falling on the houses. Tearing machine gun volleys or raping soldiers. Peace exists in the absence of violence. But peace also escapes you as easily as happiness. How often do you not have all the ingredients, but forget to add them up. Maybe it’s time for a big sign along the road: HERE IS PEACE. 

Isn’t struggle just as much a connector as peace? Think of the passion between two lovers who conquer each other; They play the game of desire, and peace has no place there. Unless the spark is gone and the fire isn’t burning, but then love often doesn’t last long. 

Struggle connects, you could say that. It’s a common thread in history. That history was advanced by conquest. One tribe subdued another, together they conquered the next, and many tribes together grew into a mighty empire. It was a struggle that bound them together: the struggle among themselves and the struggle against other tribes.

Peace is a sweet word, almost too sweet. My healthy distrust suspects that many forms of peace have been polished. Beneath the surface, there is often still a struggle. You can’t just skip that battle, then she’ll come back. We would never have had peace in Europe for so long if the pain of war had not been so clearly written on the land and in our collective memory. Peace often comes from strife, as another stage in a process in which they are inextricably linked.  

What is true on a large scale is often also true on a small scale. Just look at the struggle within ourselves, with the other or the world around us in which we want to achieve something. Inner peace comes to some more quickly than others, but it is given to only a few to achieve it without struggle. Struggle connects – as a stage of life. 

Yes, I will be guiding the world peace flame from 19 to 27 September. I walk along with that symbol of inner peace and mutual peace along our 136-kilometre route, but not as an apostle of peace or the embodiment of the ideal itself – I couldn’t live up to that. The flame wouldn’t burn for me if my inner struggle wasn’t allowed to run with me. I’m sure there are people who will recognize something of that struggle in me, as well as the desire to grow toward peace. I hope they will come along and help the ideal a little further.

Let us not brush away our humanity and at the same time reconnect with our desires and ideals. That’s what ‘a walk of wisdom’ is for. Will you walk with us?