You are worth it.
Know your worth.
How are you skills worth?
Do you know your worth?
What are you values?
Those recurring questions of nowadays personal development culture are as familiar as the Socratic method used to be.
Simple. Practical. Direct.
Despite the apparent simplicity of those questioning, how many detours, questions and inner self-reflections to sometimes merely touch the surface of the true meaning for oneself of those questions. Few months back as we started a new decade, the new spiritual rituals were constantly popping up into my screen inviting me to reflect on my 2020 resolutions, on the lessons learnt over the last decade or on what I was considering leaving behind.
I looked stone-faced at these invitations as I felt I was almost too tired to feel anything let alone gratefulness of what might have been an intense decade full of deceptions, betrayals, experiments, joys and an apparent endless journey testing my endurance in holding on to something that transcends human limited perception of oneself.
I soon was to realize that I did not want to engage into this inner process because the reality was that I did not feel it was serving anything more than my ego, this year.
My dear ego,
Yes. You. You had me fooled for a moment but nicely stepped aside when I had the courage to recognize that there is not such a thing as pushing for gratefulness or alleged positive emotions.
What I deeply wanted was just to acknowledge the variety of my emotions and the complexity of my thinking even when this brain of mine needed to be hacked by transcendental meditations, PNL or just a dose of common sense.
If I were honest, I would have liked to have used short-cuts instead of having to experiment the last decade journey with its highs and lows. With a little help from Georges Michael, I wanted to scream from the bottom of my lungs “Freedom”. I wanted to sleep. Arianna will surely be glad to know that I am grateful she made “Sleep, great again”!
This little voice of mine was more like a giant scream from the heart wanting to be free of self-pity, inner boundaries, past bad experiences or any kind of limitations or injunctions to be, to do, to process, to practice anything differently that what I felt. Suddenly, the question ‘what are your worth?’ came back and I knew what the past decade have brought into perspective and what the digital era might help us achieve as a Society and a Community.
I also knew that part of my next decade will be to take a stronger stand for our humanness and our emotions. A.I and frontier technologies being so hype, it is normal and natural to feel overwhelmed by what could be seen as a gloom future despite the efforts of media coverage and specialists to present A.I and frontier technologies as The Solution to our global challenges – climate, health, conflict resolution…
At the same time, picturing those innovations as superseding our humanness demonstrates our inability as a Society to really value what we are worth: our ability to think, our ability to imagine, our ability to create, our ability to give and create meaning, our ability to connect with one another and our ability to feel deeply.
On the threshold of a new decade, I was contemplating the immensity of the unknown and the infinite possibilities of innovation, and I felt alive and grateful for what has been and would be.
The Coronavirus crisis bringing everyone in a stand still has amplified this need for quietness when facing the unknown. An unknown that seem to bring us back again in valuing and recognizing what makes us unique (cognitive capacities, emotions) while valuing an ecosystem that can support us and not destroying us because of lack of awareness to our mission as a civilization facing the 4th industrial revolution.