Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast.

Today's podcast has been edited and adapted from the book, The Majesty of Calmness by William George Jordan,

published in 1900.

Calmness is the rarest quality in human life.

It is the signpost of a great nature in harmony with itself and its ideals.

It is the moral atmosphere of the life self-reliant and the self-controlled.

Calmness is singleness of purpose, absolute confidence and conscious power, ready to be focused in an instant to meet any

crisis. No person lives their life more fully, more intensely and more consciously than the one who is calm.

Fatalists are not calm, but coward slaves of their environment, hopelessly

surrendering to their present condition, recklessly indifferent to the future.

The fatalist accepts his or her life as a rudderless ship drifting on the ocean of time. They have no compass, no chart, no

port to which they are sailing. Their self-confessed inferiority to all nature is shown in

their existence of constant surrender. It is not calmness. We who are calm have our course in life clearly marked on our chart.

Our hand is ever on the helm.

Storm, fog, night, tempest, danger, hidden reefs,

we are ever prepared and ready for them.

For we are made calm and serene by the realization that in these crises

of our voyage we need a clear mind and a cool head, that we have nothing to do but live

each day the best we can by the light we have. That we will never flinch nor falter for a moment, that though we may have to tack and

leave our course for a time, we will never drift, we will get back into the true channel,

we will keep ever headed toward our harbor. When we will reach it, how we will reach it,

matters not to us. We rest in calm it, how we will reach it, matters not to us.

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