Peace as My Personal Foundational Principle

September, 2022. The gigantic doors opened with a creak, and the four of us travelers—me, my brother Jonathan, my father Daniel, and my uncle Nate—walked into a gilded heaven on Earth: St. Paul's Basilica of Rome, with origins dating more than a thousand years. The tiled floor spread before us hundreds of feet, and the great ceiling far above echoed with the thunderings of the bass choir practicing for next Sunday's mass.

I was fifteen years old. The awe and sense of peacefulness that washed over me then is something I will never forget; it was awesome. It marked the start of my spiritual journey.

Why peace, and why now

I had my nineteenth birthday a couple weeks ago. Now more than ever, the presence of angry and violent messages thrown across the media becomes more evident to me. Everyone's hooked on their phones, and there's so many social spaces where people hurl insults and disrespectful arguments between each other. And while I don't know much about all the wars going on, I do know billions of dollars and thousands of lives are being spent in horrible conflicts all around the world.

It's my personal belief that we're all connected. One action ripples out to everyone and back to yourself. To affect one is to affect all, including yourself.

So if that's true, what matters is choice.

We can choose to harm others, or we can choose to love them.

What the cathedrals taught me

I've been to many European cathedrals during my trips of 2022 and 2024, and each time I've been awed at these architectural masterpieces built together by peaceful people for a peaceful purpose. You can feel that in the very air of the building, and that goes for the Buddhist temple I've visited in Las Vegas and the sprawling gardens of Balboa Park in San Diego on my 2025 visit.

"Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called the Children of God." Jesus taught to love your enemies as you love yourself. It's my highest duty to love one another to bring peace on Earth, and harming others would violate that duty—even if someone else commanded me to do it. Foundational principles come first for me.

I choose peace

So if choice is what matters, then I choose peace. Now it's my duty to adhere to that choice and follow it in every action I make; whether that's the music I listen to, the people I talk to, and the things I write. Peace is my choice.

I'm an author on a mission to bring that sense of awe and peace of the cathedrals and botanic gardens to as many readers as I can. My book, Explorers of Somnium, explores what a healthy world truly looks like, and how true paradise comes from within the self. I use characters such as Travis the Sheep and Jerry Banks to show what it really means to choose peace, just as I try to do. Hopefully the ripple effects will be strong enough to really change people's lives for the better.

Why it matters

I believe peace matters. Because when there's peace, opportunities flourish. People spend less time fighting and going around in destructive circles and more time building new things and helping others. People who would have been hurt or even killed without that peace now have a whole healthy life ahead of them.

It's a whole new world of opportunities to explore.