If the story of humanity were written as a thousand-page book, the first 999 pages would tell a similar tale.

People gathered around fires. Small tribes surviving through co-operation, care, and vigilance. Other tribes were both neighbours and threats. Within these early communities, there was tenderness and belonging, but also fear and violence toward outsiders. Survival depended on the safety of the immediate group and staying alert to differences. Strangers were a potential threat, likely to be a raiding party.

On the very last page of that book, cities would appear, and only in the final few lines would we encounter machines, screens, and the relentless noise of modern life. In the briefest blink of evolutionary time, we have built a world that moves faster than our biology can easily cope with because our nervous systems are still reading from those earlier pages.

We are wired for connection, community, safety, and touch. We still long to know we belong, but we no longer live in tribes; we live in a fast-paced, multicultural, ever-changing, diverse world where there is still a massive fear of ‘others’ - a fear which gets heightened by a sense of scarcity and lack.

It is time to write a new chapter in the story of our evolution and find a way to help us regulate our nervous systems, restore trust, and learn how we can all be human together.

In 2017, Minouche Shafik, Director of the London School of Economics, said:
“In the past, jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in future, they’ll be about the heart.”

That future can be now. As AI relieves us from much of the ‘head’ work we are now freer to listen in to our hearts, and work from that space.

19 January 2026, often publicised as ‘Blue Monday’ is being re written, and is now the UK’s first official gentleness day dedicated to bringing connection, presence, joy, and peace back into the heart of society through a deeper understanding of gentleness and everyday acts of care.

Gentleness Awareness Day marks the beginning of this new story. Gentleness offers a direct pathway to the heart, and the heart is where connection, care, and a different wisdom resides.

It is a day that invites us to remember that how we meet one another, and ourselves, matters and that gentleness offers a compassionate way for us to do this.