Gratitude for Humans
What’s most important within an organization?
Its people.
As I’m transitioning from one org to another, I am reminded of this. Though this is common wisdom, deeply, truly caring about folks in the workplace is less common practice.
There are no profits without people — the individual and collective brilliance of humans.
Everything in our existence is made up, a game. We work an arbitrary 40 hours a week, we pay taxes (and have to calculate exactly how much each year when that information already exists), we build routines and structures and existence. But the magic is that we make it all up!* In a bit of a nihilist spin, there is no meaning in the world.
Until we give it meaning.
That’s what I believe.
And while we’re racing to make the next buck or the next billion, we absolutely must remember that what matters most of all is the connection, the relationships, we have with other humans. There are no profits, no regimes, no governments without their individual components, and that is all that we have in the end. Each other.
As I’m beginning to say goodbye to folks at my current org, we do not discuss the projects or tasks we worked on. We connect on how we showed up for one another, how much energy and light and spirit we brought, and how much we’ll miss the other’s presence, even if it was only digital via chat and video calls. That’s what counts. That’s what we remember on our deathbeds.
And that’s what I’m grateful for today.
*This bit is well argued in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari.
