Value?
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I hope this finds you well in these strange and strained times. My planned newsletter will be sent another time. It wasn’t right. I hope you enjoy what came to me as I slept.
It’s an old story but was reminded of it as I wrote this newsletter. There was a man in Michigan who had one of those doors that never stayed open. He fixed it by holding it open with a heavy rock he found. It did the job. For years. The value to him was enormous.
Sometimes I feel that value, like art, is undefinable, but ‘I will know it when I see it.’The man saw the rock and attached a high value to it. No longer a rock, a doorstop. After many years, a woman saw it and attached a very different value to it … $100,000 to be exact. Value, like beauty it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.
That’s not enough. We need something to help people understand if something truly is of value to them because as we journey through these strange times, I have a deep belief that value - and ‘our values’ - are going to bubble to the top of what we and collectively ‘society’ holds important.
When I was a kid, my mother used to visit a store to look at a specific wood carving. She went to that store, week after week across a period of months. She loved it. She wouldn’t buy it. One week she went to the store and the statue was gone. Where had it been moved to was the obvious question. The answer was not expected.
“So sorry madam, a gentleman came to the store this week and bought it.”
My mother was truly upset. And complained to my father all the way home. How could he do that … he knew that I wanted it.
According to my father, the expression on my mum’s face when she walked through our front door, to see the carving sitting in the middle of the living room was ‘priceless’.
Years later I find myself paying monthly for a storage container in the city of York, England. Total monetary value - not a whole hell of a lot. I have easily spent more on keeping the container than the monetary value of all of everything inside. In total. Why? Because to me, it is all valuable. Irreplaceable. Just like that wooden carving, which is just one of the items stored in the container.
Post Script
My thanks for your continued support and attention. Please like the post, share through your social channels of choice and forward the email to colleagues, friends and family that want to join us on this journey.
I truly appreciate all your support. All your comments.
