Serenity

I spent my senior year in high school in a small mid-western town where most of the people were Italian, many, old world first generation American Italian.

Families were big and close and loud!  People lived, loved and worked with family.  They sang opera while they stocked the shelves at the local grocery store.

Walking down the street was better than a soap opera!

My family tended to be a little more like our English ancestors, very dry when not drinking tea.  I wanted to suck the juice out of life back then!  I wanted emotion, excitement, drama!

So, off I went to college, searching for all these things, more than knowledge.  And I found them, but nobody told me that with drama comes sorrow... and anxiety....and all sorts of other less enjoyable things.  And nobody told me that drama is like a snowball rolling downhill.  It just keeps coming and getting bigger.

In the end peace has turned out to be more difficult to find.  Searching for serenity requires an awful lot more focus.  Serene moments bracket drama like ear muffs on giant speakers.  In that small space I am now often able to find the real joy I thought was in the racket before.

There is a drama to peace that super-cedes the slippery surface smiles of simple chaos, but like everything else I had to develop a taste for it.