Unlimited Quote Collections
Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.
<b>How to Jump</b>: Once again we stand before our audience. The _Others_ wait for us to speak. Still we ask, how can we jump free? How can we speak.… - Gerry Spence
" "How to Jump: Once again we stand before our audience. The _Others_ wait for us to speak. Still we ask, how can we jump free? How can we speak. I say, turn inward. Feel the fear. Again, touch where it resides — yes, just above the solar plexus, that one glowing spot in painful spasm. Feel it. for there we can begin with something we know is _real_. And now can we jump?
Sometimes when I begin a speech, I look each member of the audience in the eyes. In a large group it sometimes takes a half minute or more. The silence grows uncomfortable. the people stare back. I hear the nervous coughs. But something has happened between us. Without words, I have shared with them the same feelings I suffer. I have felt fear, and then turn, have felt its discomfort in the pressing silence in the room.
Finally I begin, “It’ is all right for us to feel uncomfortable as we launch our relationship. We do not know each other. We have no experience upon which to trust each other. Why shouldn’t we feel uncomfortable. I wondered as I looked at you what you expect of me. What do you think of me? And as I look at you, you too, must have wondered what I am thinking of you.” I have jumped. “We are going to have a valuable time together.” I have broken free.
English
Collect this quote
About Gerry Spence
Gerald Leonard Spence (born 8 January 1929) is an American lawyer and writer.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Birth Name:
Gerald Leonard Spence
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Gerry Spence
"Every living thing feels because feeling is a dimension of the universe. I daresay rocks feel in the way of rocks. I daresay the stars feel in the way of stars. If we can feel stars, feel their beauty, feel their majesty, how could we so arrogantly insist that a star, one that has existed in the universe for billions of years, one that came into being at the time of the "big bang," cannot also feel? Any astrophysicist will tell us stars have lives of their own. How can we of such piddling knowledge, of such puny understanding, of such fleeting existence, how can we who live but who cannot fully explain the life of the simplest of cells — how can such as we proclaim that the universe is bereft of all feeling except our own? Can we not leave room for the possibility that the universe itself is composed of endless feeling?"
Loading...