Last January I went to Panama with Earth Train’s Mother Nature CEO Program, jointly led by Lider Sucre and Nathan Gray. Both Lider and Nathan are truly inspiring figures and recently Nathan proved why I hold him in such high regard.
In one of his emails, Nathan shared that following a 2008 surgery to remove a benign tumor in his brain, his doctors have recently discovered another one, twice the size, pressing on his brain stem. He is now scheduled to have open-brain surgery in September.
If given such news, I, like most of us, would have freaked out. Nathan didn’t, and believes this to be (in his own words) “nature’s way of nudging me to focus on what’s important”. You can learn more about a person by how they respond to hardships over success’. I would like to share part of his email:
“ … We all talk about the importance of teaching a man how to fish. Nice, and certainly better than trying to hand out fish. But, in a world where our seas are acidifying, that´s but a four-foot jump over a six-foot trench. What we need to do is to teach men, women and children how to teach and, ultimately, how to create learning communities. We´ve been content to focus on tools for positive change, be that projects or inventions like micro water purification units. We need to encourage the emergence of tool-makers. Teachers, tool-makers, and community builders are the vanguard of a liveable future.”
Nathan, you truly inspire me.
– Paul Keijzer
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouftNVYlhkE]
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Mother Nature CEO, Panama 2012
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