Duck Billed Platitudes.

My bohemian friend Bethany keeps a blog of quotes and since she is a bohemian I feel that it is my duty to always be on the lookout for good quotes from the grind side (aka: the nine-to-five side).  The best place to harvest inspirational quotes has to be, hands-down, the work conference. When team building is the goal, you can count on some pep talks, power points, and tree metaphors - and always a motivational presentation.

The conference I attended last week was non-profit so the motivational speaker demonstrated a kind of inspiration-economics that a lower budget would demand. She could not risk NOT inspiring us. We did not have a lot of time. 

She came in, lit some candles while reading a poem about hope with the help of some lackluster audience participation and then she proceeded to recite all the hits of every heartwarming email forward about human kindness she had ever received. There was a story about being a carrot or an egg or coffee, and one about being a voice not an echo and another about tugging a dead elephant and another about a growing tree and still more about kindness of strangers and the serendipitiousness of serendipity and the thrill of giving and the wonder of cats. At one point she was throwing out so many inspirational quotes – I thought I heard one Bethany would dig and wanted to write it down, but they were coming at us so fast I couldn’t remember if we should be like the eggs or the coffee. I looked over at the woman next to me and saw that she had made a note to herself that said:

“You were born an original. Don’t die a copy. ~ Ghandi”

I became very concerned that the woman might repeat this error somewhere important, like in her email signature or an office newsletter. However, even after all the inspirational bullets being shot at me for the previous hour, I did not have the nerve, the confidence, the ethics, or the kindness to mention anything to her - even when she offered me a piece of gum later.  What is the big deal anyway? Everybody loves Ghandi. He probably said something close when he was going through his individualistic phase.

The moral of the story? It doesn’t really matter what your hear, only what you write.