Like many of you I was shocked with the result of the referendum on Friday. In fact I was so unhappy that I could find in myself nothing but an angry voice. Truth be told I was never as angry in my entire life as when I heard of the Prime Minister’s resignation. Then, a day later, after I vented some of my frustration on social media, I realised one thing: how difficult it is to be kind when we’re angry. How difficult… it is.. to be kind when we’re angry. I think it is quite a powerful realisation. One that probably would help us all in dealing with and processing changes that we might not want go through.
On the Saturday and Sunday I was fortunate to be with family and friends celebrating the christenings of two wonderful little girls and on the Saturday when we were driving south with my family, I was thinking about the people who for the last forty or more years worked for European cooperation and strongly believed in its core values and purpose in the world. I felt the tragedy that they were going through, I saw the debris of their collapsed world and I heard the question that they were perhaps asking themselves: Was it all in vein? And my answer to them was: Don’t even think for one minute that it was in vein. It would be much greater a personal tragedy if for forty years you were working against your core values. That, to me, would be a tragedy.
So here came another realisation to me that actually it doesn’t matter if things fail in the end, but what matters is that you still want to commit and create. As Elizabeth Gilbert once said: Your ego is wounded but your soul is fine, your soul just says: Do you want to do it again? Do you still want to work for those values? That’s the key question.
Postcards Without Stamps 