The Queen Elizabeth, Duty and Your Art

Leading with Integrity

Like much of the world, I have been thinking about Queen Elizabeth.


Regardless of yours or my personal beliefs about The Monarchy, Queen Elizabeth was a person - she was a Mother, Grandmother, Sister, Friend and Wife.


And she lived her whole life fulfilling what she believed to be her Duty.


With any public death, although we may not know them personally, it resonates.


Because Death is universal - we all bear the weight of loved ones who are no longer physically with us.


There’s a Buddhist parable in which a woman goes weeping to the Buddha and asks him to bring her young son back from the dead. He agrees if she'll bring him a mustard seed from a house that has never seen death. So, she goes on a long search and comes back empty-handed – every house she went to had seen death and her sense of aloneness in her grief began to subside. “No house is free from death,” she realised.…' [source]


Yet, even though we are all touched by it, we are uncomfortable with death.


It reminds us that our life will one day end too, and how we lead our life matters.


And although we don't bear the weight of a Monarch's duty to lead nations, we are all leaders in our own small way.


In our work, as a parent or carer, in a social group or on social media, in conversation with strangers and yes, even as artists.


And leaders have Duty.


A duty to show up with integrity by doing our best to make things better.


It just so happens that the word 'integrity' comes from the Latin 'integer' which means 'whole.'


And leading our lives with a sense of duty would be a life lived with integrity - a wholesome life.

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Your House?

I'm here if you want to share your story about grief, just email me or write a reply in the comment section.

You can read mine here.

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