Four Seconds of Inspiration

Feb 9, 2016 9:00 AM ET
Campaign: Ecocentricity Blog

Four Seconds of Inspiration

Despite our best efforts, separating ourselves from nature is a fruitless endeavor. So long as we are made primarily of carbon, we are nature. So long as we breath in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, we are nature.

As I sit down to write this post, I think my mood can be described best by the following: feeling a temptation towards philosophical musings of the sort that would come naturally to you if we were sipping Earl Grey tea surrounded by many leather bound books. And here we go….

The spoken word can be truly remarkable, with its potential to inspire and motivate buoyed by the multiplicity of forms which it can take.

[He takes a sip of tea, then realizes that sentence was one of the most uppity he’s ever written]

Sorry, let me get ahold of myself and try again, with something comprehensible this time.

So this last weekend, I finished listening to the audiobook version of The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy. It might be my favorite novel of all time, and I found it as enjoyable now as I did when I read it in high school. I soaked up all of its 21 hours, inspired to be a better, kinder, more gentle man. To me, that’s the moral of the story, but the book contains an abundance of lessons (as most any good book does).

Then today I was reminded that a mere sentence spoken in about four seconds can be just as powerful. Especially when the person speaking it is Janine Benyus.

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