[CONTENT WARNING: descriptions of war and bereavement]
How are you, lovely friends? These are dark days and dangerous times – wherever you are, I hope you’re safe and well.
I write this at three in the morning, after a day of news reports of buildings shelled and civilians killed, of a tangle of people and pets huddled in sleeping bags and under blankets in the Ukrainian metro, like the Londoners sheltering from the Blitz in tube stations nearly 80 years ago. History repeating itself in living colour.
Bombed out armoured vehicles and blocks of flats sliced to the bone by airstrikes, their mangled girders and tattered, exposed remnants of family photo frames and sofas and gutted rooms dangling precariously in the wind.
Senior citizens in worn trousers and puffer jackets confronting embarrassed enemy soldiers, fingers jabbing the air:
‘What the f**k are you doing in our land with all of these guns?’
I can’t sleep.
I keep thinking of the the endless march of fleeing people, having grabbed whatever they could to sustain them, dragging wheelie cases for miles beside traffic jams on the roads to the border.
The father tucking his daughter into her little jacket, nuzzling her neck and crying an uncontrollable goodbye as he evacuates her to safety, not knowing if they will ever see each other again.
The rush and push and panic of a sea of passengers desperate to get onto trains heading out of the cities.
The makeshift outdoor Molotov cocktail factories sprung up out of brewing plants, the empty bottles that should have been intended for bars and cafes and nights of carefree fun and friendship and laughter, stuffed with shredded polystyrene and filled with petrol to be launched at enemy tanks.
The broadcast of the border guards defending Snake Island against an attacking warship, knowing full well that their defiant words, ‘Russian warship, go f**k yourself’, would be their last.
The joyful video taken some time ago of one of them dancing at the barracks, wiggling cheekily in his fatigues, full of life – now gone, a war hero, sleeping alongside his brothers and sisters in arms.
Photographs of a fallen military couple, their right to a future and family and years of happiness together brutally stolen from them. They, too, will sleep in a hero’s grave.
The tears of a people suffering.
And the stark contrast with the peace and place of safety and comfort I am in.
Yesterday, I got in my car in the sunshine and drove around the city. The rays streamed in through the windscreen, warming me as everything appeared, on the surface, to be normal.
Except it wasn’t.
Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini came on the radio. I just wanted to drive and drive until I reached the edge of land and could go no further.
Not long ago, in the context of Covid lockdown, I challenged the tone deafness of toxic positivity advocates portraying crisis as a personal development demand: if you didn’t squeeze the last drop of self- actualisation out of it, you’re a failure. Censure yourself for being slack, loser.
It’s always the same old, tedious schtick: from the safest places come the bravest words.
This time, I’ve seen posts debating whether it’s tone-deaf to continue pushing our business on social in the current situation. Whether it’s right to pause. Whether it’s OK to reference sad or tragic events so long as they’re ‘aligned with our brand’.
What’s particularly egregious is that some of the people gently reminding others to read the international room are being criticised for it.
How so little changes. That even in the midst of a vicious war, people still have such a staggering propensity for self-focus.
Do I really need to argue why? Ignoring that the safety, freedom and space exists just to be able to ask those questions, is tone-deaf in itself.
Extraordinary that some simply can’t seem to recognise the privilege of it, while others just four hours away by air are being dragged away by repressive enforcement for protesting.
And in very real fear for their lives where the aggression is being prosecuted.
***
I watched the selfie video of President Zelenskyy, taken in a curfewed central Kyiv in the early hours of Saturday morning. He looked tired, dark circles under his eyes. But in good spirits, reassuring, unbroken.
What moved me the most was the kindness in his face. ‘I am here,’ he said. It will have meant a great deal to those who needed to see it.
There will be no spin in this post. No newsjacking to make a point about business or freelancing, or self-care, or how we can employ the art of war to succeed in our enterprises.
The bald truth is, I’m tired of egotism.
I’m tired of evil.
And I’m so very tired of our perpetual human inability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes.
Self-leadership starts with recognising we’re all interconnected. What happens to others matters.
And it stops when we fail to realise we aren’t the centre of the universe.
There are so many important, vital, urgent lessons from where we are today.
We just need to break the cycle and learn them.
If not now, when?
The Serialist 