Urban Grind

For a few years now I have been wanting to hold one of these workshops (see attachment). Just before the war on Iraq, I and a few friends tried to walk from Brisbane to Canberra to stop the war on Iraq from starting. I think it was after about 21 days that we found ourselves somewhere past Coffs Harbour that we decided to come home. This question was one of my reasons for turning around, like many of my other reasons which were about questioning our approach to things like preventing war.

If you think about it, except for the rare examples like map magazine, most of our main stream media, and our so called alternative (don’t get me started) media, only educate us on war. Even when trying to turn us towards peace the conversation is about war. Instead of defining peace, war is defined yet again. If 5 years ago I said, “Don’t buy a petrol burning, environmentally damaging car.”, the answer would have to have been “Why not, it is the only thing they are selling.” And such is the loop we are in with the attainment of world peace. Held up in contrast to war, wouldn’t peace pretty much sell itself. Fear is still considered the only motivator.

Further, I have experienced that if you want to achieve anything, you have to know what you want to achieve and be willing to do what it takes to get there. You also need to be able to measure your success along the way, and you can only do that relative to what you are trying to achieve.

Originally the ‘what is peace’ workshop was held on just one night. It has been expanded to be a 10 week workshop because when we asked what peace was, it turned out that we didn’t know very much either about the things we were suggesting made up what peace was. So the first night is ‘what is peace’ then the second night might be ‘what is kindness’ and so on.

The workshops are every Monday night at 6:30pm from the 3rd of September 07. Numbers are limited to 8 places of which I have 2 left. It is free and at Urban Grind. If you are interested please contact me.