Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace within it

I have just returned from a talk given across town by the principal spokesman for the largest military alliance in the world. When I walked back into the living room at home, where the artist had just stopped working, our 5-year-old son popped his little head up from behind the bright red sofa, and let out a sigh of relief. There had been a severe electrical storm and he had been worried about me, and was still a little worried for himself. I looked at the artist, then back at our son. I placed a hand on his warm shoulder and kissed the top of his head. Where exactly studies of conflict fit into this is debatable. Maybe it is some kind of weird muscularisation of a strong sense of peace. A feeling of unfinished business. An appetite. A new career. A craving for content. An affirmative thirst for knowledge. A working hunch. I am sitting at the round red table now. The artist is on the sofa. Her new piece is on the wall, to her right, and looks as abstract as camouflage, especially as it begins only in places to take shape. Anyway, our son is asleep next to her and the news on the TV shows a plane looking sad, broken, deflated, next to its intended runway. There must have been, oh, two dozen nationalities in the room where the talk took place. It was a public discussion, open to anyone: there just isn't that large an appetite these days for subjects such as agreements to mutual defence in response to attacks by external parties. Only, external parties weren't really discussed, not in the intended sense, as the organisation in question is a kind of external party in itself in the theatre of operations where most of the discussion was centred. I stare at my son still asleep on the bright red sofa - a gentle smile on his face - and think about the children in the war zone who never wake up. The idea, lest we forget, is for that number, that figure, to come down.