I know it’s past it’s hype, and people may no longer speak about this. But, am I too late to share my thoughts about it? I decided to forgive myself writing this on the 2nd week of January where a lot of people have done this before the end of the 2021. I don’t really have the habit of reflecting at the end of the year. My mind is probably too agile. I do reflect on things quite often, continuously, but not in particular timing like maybe many people do. I usually do by comparing my milestones, my achievements, also my failures, against the values that I believe in. The values which are mostly not changed, but the ways, the actions, the responds, have changed and will continuously change.
This is not me sharing the values I believe in, simply because it may not be good to do so. Nevertheless, I hope people can recognise those values, by the words coming out from my mouth (or my blog), by my actions and reactions of things, and by my way of doing things. Again, it may not be a successful effort, but we are living in a world full of failures anyway. I just hope that the world is quite forgiving for that.
Most people are sharing their reflections in social medias, but if we tried to recognise it further, only small percentage of them are sharing their failures. Most of them are sharing the parties they attended, the promotion they got, the birth of their kids, birthdays they managed to celebrate, or travelings they did within the year. It makes a dangerous perception of using social media only to display your good side, but not your ugly side because it’s not selling. Nobody wants to hear or see about your heartbreak, your desperation, your sad period of life. But as human being, we surely can’t escape from our pain. Chaos will still be there, and pain is actually helping us to change.
When you hit your pinky with a hammer, accidentally, you are hurt, you feel pain. It makes you realize that you need to be more careful on using hammer so it won’t hit your fingers anymore. This is why pain is actually required. At certain degree, it helps us to evolve, to think, to change. But now in a world where you can be as painless as you could, this benefit of pain to notify human to change has been suppressed. Even at work, not a lot of companies or organizations have an good and constructive treshold for failures. It makes the employees afraid of making mistakes, therefore they are not improving, they are stopping themselves to change.
What I learned from the past year was, that I am one of the guys. I am afraid of making mistakes, so that I tried so hard not to. It was successful at some degrees, but of course it comes with consequences. When you are too absorbed to make everything perfect, you let go some of the things that may contribute to your values. So, I let myself reflect on many things related to my values, and to see everything that I have done if they contributed to those values or not. Then I know what to prioritize next.
This is not the end. Even though values should not change as much and as frequent as the actions and methodologies, but values are also changing. For example, the way the world see the value of environment sustainability has changed a lot compared to it was a century ago. Therefore we have renewable energy, measurement of carbon footprint, and so on, and so on. This what makes life interesting. Even the value that we believe in, the things that has been the core of our being so far, will change. It’s not about how amazing the values that we are hanging onto at this moment, but how good we are to realize the need to change, the need to adapt, not only for survival but to contribute for a better world to live in. Even though it means that we need to change some of our values.
So my resolution is simple. I wish I have the strength to be that agile. To keep my awareness of any changes that are happening around me. And to see if there are doors opened, and to be ready for it. Also, to make my environment more forgiving, so that we can live with our pain, but evolving better and better at the same time. Simple, but apparently not easy to do.
If you minds speak the same wave length, let’s connect, whether you agree or disagree. Who knows what better resolutions we could come up with, knowing almost no limit what more than 1 people can do collaboratively.
Happy new year folks. Be well.
Alexander Tejasukmana
Alexander Tejasukmana 