I think we misunderstood something fundamental about ourselves. We speak constantly about worship as though it belongs to individuals, leaders, celebrities, influencers, religious figures, historical figures, teachers, gurus, lovers, and heroes. We have built entire cultures around elevating people onto pedestals and then wondering why those same pedestals eventually crack beneath their weight. The problem may not be that humanity worships. The problem may be that humanity forgot what the instinct was for.

I worship the land I have walked. I worship the conversations that changed me. I worship the people who entered my life, whether for a day or a decade. I worship the mistakes that educated me, the joys that nourished me, the losses that expanded me, the books that found me at the right moment, the trees that gave me shade, the oceans that reminded me of scale, the cities that tested me, the strangers that reflected me, and the opportunities that revealed what I was capable of. In other words, I worship life.

That is very different from worshipping a person.

When you worship a person, your attention narrows. The individual becomes the centre of gravity. Their success, their opinions, their choices, their image, their existence begin occupying more space than your own relationship with reality. The danger is not admiration. Admiration is beautiful. The danger is forgetting that the person was only ever one expression of life itself. The moment we become attached to the expression more than the source from which it emerged, we begin losing perspective.

Life is larger than any individual who has ever lived. Every person who has inspired us, every prophet, every philosopher, every scientist, every artist, every leader, every teacher, every revolutionary, every parent, every lover, every friend, every enemy, every child, every ancestor, every future generation, all of them exist inside life. Life is the container. The person is the experience. Somewhere along the way, humanity became fascinated with the experience and forgot the container.

Perhaps that is why I care so much about standards. If I worship life, then naturally I want life to thrive. I want relationships to be healthier. I want businesses to function better. I want education to expand. I want consciousness to deepen. I want communities to become stronger. I want people to experience more truth, more harmony, more nurture, more responsibility, more beauty. Not because I am obsessed with control, but because I am devoted to the thing I worship. Devotion always wants what it loves to flourish.

This is why I become uncomfortable when people focus too heavily on me. Not because I reject appreciation, but because the point was never me. If someone studies my work, I want them to discover themselves. If someone follows my journey, I want them to become more engaged with their own. If someone sees something beautiful in me, I want them to investigate the part of themselves that recognised it. The purpose is not to create spectators. The purpose is to create participants.

I am not interested in being worshipped. I am interested in helping people remember what is actually worthy of worship. Life. The whole thing. The messy thing. The painful thing. The beautiful thing. The absurd thing. The miraculous thing. The thing that includes every person without belonging to any single one of them.

Maybe that is the misunderstanding. Maybe we were never given the instinct to worship individuals. Maybe we were given the instinct to revere existence itself. To appreciate the fact that we are here at all. To honour the opportunity of being alive. To participate consciously in the experience. To protect it. To nurture it. To improve it. To contribute to it. To leave it better than we found it.

Because when you worship life, everyone benefits. When you worship a person, eventually someone gets forgotten. Life excludes nobody. Life contains everything. And perhaps the highest expression of devotion is not bowing before a single individual, but standing in awe of the fact that all of us are here together, participating in the same miracle from different points of view.