New word in my peace vocabulary: pronoia

Have you heard of pronoia? According to author Rob Brezny, it's the opposite of paranoia. It's when you assume that the universe is constantly trying to shower you with unexpected blessings. (Thanks for that tip, Audrey.)

The story goes that Brezny was driving along a California freeway when he found himself embroiled in some road rage with the female driver of a Jaguar. He became furious, then unexpectedly calm. He tossed into her car an eight-pointed star made of hundred dollar bills, a treasured talisman made for him by a friend.

[Ed. note: If you click that link, you'll have to ignore or forgive all the instances in which these two people almost cause car accidents, and remember that we at HumanKind don't literally advocate throwing things into strangers' cars while driving, especially at freeway speeds. The lesson here, though, is bigger. Bear with us.]

She appeared to calm down immediately, and she took the next exit. He went on, pondering whether his unexpected gift meant something to her -- and realizing she had made an unexpected gift to him. There was a blessing in the confrontation: "I vow to be vigilant for the possibility that any place and any time may become the holy ground where I can commit radical acts of pronoia," he writes. "I promise to seize the pregnant pauses, leap into the empty spots, and squeeze through the cracks in the system."

Now that you think about it, aren't you constantly being showered with blessings, even in the midst of pain and confrontation? Yesterday I was in a midtown subway station at rush hour, listening to a man and a woman scream profanities at each other, apparently because one had bumped into the other. So much for world peace, said my cynical brain.

But then I remembered something important: I know that peace does not mean some numbed up, blissed out state in which no one ever hurts anyone else again. We will always be this fallible, we will always feel urges toward anger and viciousness, and sometimes we'll just flat out give in and scream at a stranger in a subway station. Peace is when we all agree to make those moments of abuse of others and of self happen less frequently. When we're deliberate about admitting those urges toward harm, and deliberate about transmuting them into moments of connection and forgiveness.

That was my experience of pronoia. Witnessing that confrontation turned into a moment of thoughtfulness and peace for me. And I hope that the two people involved experienced a blessing afterward, too. Maybe it was the turning point of their day, the moment when each realized they were stressed to the hilt and had just taken it out on a stranger. Maybe each resolved to work less and rest more. Maybe that moment of anger was actually a beginning of world peace.