The line between great suffering and agitation, and the state of joy and peace, is quite thin. I would like to propose that peace and suffering are a result of one thing...
Willingness.
For the vast majority of people on this planet, their personas, their preferences, their likes and dislikes, their opinions, their love affairs, their beliefs, and even their own personal identifications, are all a series of conscious and mostly unconscious reactions to the past. Reacting to the past simply perpetuates the past. In order to create something new, we must learn how to go beyond the past.