Navigating with Kindness series – a reflection from Maria Amidu

The third in our series of responses to a prompt card from our resource Navigating with Kindness comes from artist and People United Trustee, Maria Amidu (pictured).

We asked Maria to consider the card “are you living your values?” which is pictured above, along with the following prompts:

Are your core principles and values being enacted in your life at this testing time? Are they being challenged or encouraged?

In what way are you behaving differently? Are you reflecting more on your values? Have you noticed others – individuals or organisations/institutions – adjusting their behaviour to reflect their core values?

Maria came back with the following piece, which considers what she values highly and encourages us to do the same…

“i value a lot of things but what i value just now even more than usual is honesty: honest governance (not sure how much of this we are getting) ; honest reporting (this depends on how you choose to consume the news) ; a good, hard, honest look at the way things were before Covid-19 brought us all to a grinding halt (appalling for a lot of people actually) ; and most of all honesty about how we are all really feeling…

i don’t subscribe to hiding from those deep-down-dark emotions ; recently, i’ve been documenting ways i have dealt with past traumas, in the hope this might be helpful – to me, to family, to friends, to colleagues, to strangers…

so, on those days when being wrapped up in your duvet is preferable to whatever is demanding you pay attention or you need to slow down you might find something of value here: www.mariaand.co/window #feelingallthefeelings

i hope so because another thing i really value is being useful…

take care”

You can read more of Maria’s thoughts during these strange times in her daily blog, “feeling all the feelings”.