In Peace.

I'm not feeling my best today. I guess that's okay because it seems  like my mind does the most  profound thinking when I am under the weather. I was thinking about the term "Rest In Peace" and what it means and what it's been symbolizing for as long as I can remember. It is usually used as a final farewell to a loved one lost. Still, I never quite understood why it even needed to be said  in the first place. Simply because, it always seemed a little bit redundant to me. Isn't rest, peace in itself? Why exactly do we wish the dead peace? They are the ones they who have been freed from their mortal coils and are done with the stresses of the world. No matter what a person's religious beliefs about what's in store for a person after his/her heart stops beating, the universal consensus seems to be freedom. Freedom from what those that are still breathing, see as the challenges of everyday life. I feel as though we should be walking around, telling those that are still here with us to "Live in  Peace." Surviving life is the ultimate fete. Everyday we choose to persevere, is a small victory. Some people are in constant search of a silver lining in a sea of doubt and despair, but no one ever wishes them well. I realize now, that that particularly unfortunate fact is based on the truth that we as human beings, struggle with sentiment and the delay of it. No one ever seems to truly care until it is too late to mean anything. The more I think about it, the more I start to grasp why it would be easier to to say "Rest in Peace" to a corpse than to declare that an actual breathing person "Live In Peace." Well for starters, a corpse doesn't have any reaction based off  of the words said specifically for them. If you tell someone breathing to live in peace, they'll probably take that as an opportunity to tell you all the terrible, saddening reasons why they can't. That is, if they don't look at like you you're a complete psychopath and proceed to give you the silent treatment first. I honestly wish people took offering words of peace to the living as seriously as they take offering it to the deceased. Maybe then people wouldn't act so awkwardly to things that society should already accept. Like a woman's right to say no and make it home safely, the LBGTQ+ community, black people, black people IN the LBGTQ+ community, basic human kindness, you know things like that. Maybe if we told each other to "Live in Peace" more often, maybe one day, some of us will actually adhere to the words and use the notion behind them to better the world we are currently suffering through.