There are many pleasant notions that present themselves, on one's walk through any given day, present themselves like flowers holding their faces to the summer sun… should you choose to look at them, they are there. 

To disemburden the heart requires practice, however, and patience, as well as a disciplined mind to keep cloud or eclipse away from those moments of ease. Cloud will come, of course, it always does — let it come, but in five minutes, I am busy with a flower — which makes it all the more important to remember sun, flower, embrace, release, and renewal, to remember that they exist, or risk ingratitude for the gift of life.

Autobiography

A bird will sing
To the soft flower of sun
Even if the flower blooms a moment

Beauty is waiting at the tips of your fingers, at the corner of your eye. So easy to ignore it. Because everything remains in balance — how could it not? — and less pleasurable vistas impress themselves upon us with regularity. There is enough struggle in a life, in some lives more than others, and at some times most intense while at others almost imperceptible, that a heart and a mind cannot contain the pain of living. 

Those who have studied pain may be fortunate enough to have learned tools to process it, to allow it to wash the cells from the inside out, pass through them without striking full force, and to let the stillness which follows any storm remain. But those who have not studied pain believe it can be avoided… and in their denial that it touches every life, even their own, lash out: to hurt it, to frighten it away, and in the process wound those within their reach.

The root of violence is pain which has been denied. The heart of compassion the pain which has been acknowledged.

The violence which springs from our pain and our fears is expressed in many ways, but all hold to a common thread. The most easily recognized is overt action, a slap or a shout, a bruise or a body cowering. Less easily seen as violence are those actions which leave the stripe of a whip on the psyche: the cutting remark, or worse, the diminishing comment spoken in jest, delivered with a smile. More subtle yet, there is a violence of disempowerment, where a stronger will removes the ability to act from the less confrontational will; where there is a will, it will have its way.

And then there is violence of thought, as the root of one's being, which nothing but an intervention of one's peers has a hope of touching: the violence you practice in silence, upon yourself, which becomes after time the habit of your being, and which slips from you in your attitudes and actions, a pain which is carefully buried under rationalizations and ethics.

You can piously point to others' actions and frown, and say I would never do that. And you can scowl at those who shout at their children, that is an easy mark. You might practice enough sensitivity to see when a charity is not being charitable, but patronizing, and try — though it is difficult — to be charitable while treating the recipient of your efforts as an equal. If you have practiced living with consensus, you might try — though it is harder still — to let go of your closely-held objectives in favor of a more generally accepted truth.

But you will not erase the violence from your own heart — the minor violences of the ego, not recognizing another's uniqueness, or the greater violence of intolerance; the most insidious violence of your own projected uneasiness, which paint your beliefs as truth — without great practice and greater humility.

While there is violence in your heart, while your thoughts are violent in nature, violence will result, and despite your comfortable self-assertion to the contrary, or more accurately because of it, you will act with violence without even realizing it. And blame another for the act.

Thich Nhat Hahn is a modern master of living in harmony with others. His books Joyfully Together, and Anger speak incredibly clearly about the causes of strife and more healthy and more human methods to address them. 

A few years back, I was fortunate to attend a talk with the Master at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston. His words were spoken so softly, one had to become still to hear them: even in such a large space, he did not use the force of an orator or a politician to make himself heard, rather invited our attention with the strength of water over stone. Several hundred listeners were completely still, still enough to hear one's heart beat, while I understood the Master to say:

There will not be peace on the Earth until there is peace in your heart. The root of violence is your anger, and your anger and your violence exist within you, they are not created there by others. Once you have met your pain, your anger, once you have met them in the mirror of your actions and your words, you begin to be more skillful in the art of being. Then the fist of your heart unclenches, then you treat your own sad and delightful life with caresses, and finally — and only then — your have a caress to give he world.