We live in a time when reading forms the basis of our civilization.

Think about this for a moment.

If you are a businessman, doctor, engineer, professor, scientist, teacher, student, lawyer, police officer, mayor, or administrator, the majority of your work begins in some type of reading.  It could be a quarterly report, a patient’s records, a site plan, a dissertation, curriculum, an essay, rap sheet, report, city council minutes, or other type of report.  The list is endless!  Reading is the basis and beginning of all these professions.

Some may wonder, “What if I choose a job as a cashier, custodian, burger-flipper, or gas station worker?”  Regardless, you still have to read.  McDonald’s, for example, has a manual that its employees read that explains the procedures of the restaurant and the way employees are to carefully perform their job.  A custodian has plans to read that inform him how to clean and organize the place where he works.  Reading is unavoidable.  This type of reading is necessary and important therefore it is the moral duty of parents and teachers to ensure that their children are able to read adequately, but the above mentioned type of reading frequently does not add to our personal growth as much as a second type of reading.

There is a second type of reading that is increasingly becoming neglected in society and that is reading for inspiration, inspiration that leads to growth, knowledge, and experience.  This is the type of reading that the people who founded all the fields above, (and who were extremely successful) engaged in, and this type of reading helped them think creatively to lead to beneficial innovation.  Such people include revolutionary scientists as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, and the Founding Fathers of the United States.  The list is enormous.

  Picture © Daniel Hanna

Inspiration is a word we often hear.  We may hear it in contexts such as the following: “That speech was inspirational,” “He is an inspiring figure,” “What is your inspiration?” or “He inspired me to follow my dreams.”  But what does inspiration really mean?

The word inspiration comes from two Latin words: in + spiration which together mean “breathing into.”  The word respiration in English which simply means “to breathe” comes from the same root as inspiration.

Just as it is impossible to live without breathing, it is impossible to live without inspiration. Inspiration must come.  The environment you are in is the environment you breathe in.  The question is: What type of inspiration is that going to be?