Service and Impact: My Platinum Jubilee Reflections

Apart from being a welcome time of rest (and enjoyment), the Platinum Jubilee was - for me - a time for reflection. For those who don't know what was happening in the UK from 2nd - 5th or why people were exclaiming "PLATTY JOOBS!", I'll explain:

This weekend the UK celebrated 70 years of the longest-serving monarchy in the UK's history - Queen Elizabeth II. Since the age of 27, she has been at the helm of the royal family, carrying out her birthright duty.

As someone on the millennial/Gen Z border, I could not imagine myself staying in the same role for SEVENTY years and to be honest, as someone in their 20s, I'm not sure I can imagine seventy years full stop!

A couple of days before the Platinum Jubilee, I had the pleasure of presenting an award to someone who had dedicated over FORTY-FIVE years to serving their community and committing to nation-building.

As I have gotten older, I have been moving away from the excitement of short term high impact projects and have been growing in my appreciation for (and my pursuit of) the long term deliberate ways to serve communities in the most impactful ways.

So, what did I find myself reflecting on?

1. Service is a life-long commitment. The way we serve will look different as we go through different seasons in our life but our willingness to serve should always remain. The way in which we serve requires us to assess our own capacity, to know when we need to slow down, speed up, pivot or stop. All are important.
2. We have to find things bigger than ourselves and accept that the change we want to see in the world will probably not be achieved in our lifetime, but even more importantly, we can not achieve that change by ourselves.
3. I alluded to this in another post but we have to know when to pass the baton on. The change we want to see will always be bigger than us (as I said above), so we cannot make ourselves the centre of the change. We are only a vehicle and at some point, there will be other vehicles.

To conclude: I'm inspired and a little nervous. I know there are no perfect career decisions but I hope I can learn from all the people that have consistently committed to serving in their wide-ranging capacities. I hope to stay teachable, introspective and dedicated to the communities that I want to serve.

I hope you enjoyed these loosely put together thoughts that I had. I would love to hear if anyone has any other thoughts - feel free to comment or DM.