Certain experiences rise above the everyday. They don’t merely impress us – they overwhelm us. They bypass cognition and connect directly with your soul, producing an involuntary jolt that makes you want to leap from your seat. These are the kinds of performances, passages, or images that compel you to pause and admit without hesitation: this is different.
My life has been punctuated by such experiences – temporal bookmarks that shape how I remember entire periods of time.
In sport, these moments are unforgettable. Vince Carter levitating in the 2000 Slam Dunk Contest – his performance so audacious that his competitors laughed and commentators declared the event finished. Lionel Messi at Barcelona, slaloming past defenders as if the laws of physics bent to him. Mick Foley being thrown from the top of a twenty-foot cell, redefining athletic limits and the resilience of the human body. Usain Bolt is rewriting what was thought possible in the 100m sprint, turning speed into poetry. Michael Phelps collecting gold after gold in Beijing, making the impossible look inevitable. Chris Hoy winning gold in the velodrome at the Beijing 2008 Olympics after the three competitors in succession had broken the world record.
Music delivers the same phenomenon in a single line. Imagine all the people, living life in peace, from John Lennon’s Imagine. Hello darkness, my old friend from Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence. If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair from Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco, capturing the spirit of an era. Every form of refuge has its price from The Eagles, a reminder that beauty often carries weight and consequence. These lines are deceptively simple yet seismic, resonating far beyond their melodies.
Art, too, offers this mysterious force. I recall the first time I saw Monet’s Houses of Parliament, or stood in front of my first Mondrian. I couldn’t articulate why those canvases connected with me so completely. But perhaps that is the point: art does not always ask to be understood – it asks to be felt.
I call these transcendent moments – rare flashes when craft, whether in sport, music, art, or literature, breaks its boundaries and becomes timeless.
Here is the truth: I am striving hard to create these moments myself.
In my first book – nearly 500 pages long and composed of thousands of sentences – I can identify perhaps five lines that give me goosebumps. Five lines that make me stop, look away, and think: yes, that was it; that was what I was reaching for.
Those moments are humbling, even slightly embarrassing (in many ways). But that rarity is the point. If every line induced goosebumps, none would matter. It is scarcity that creates value, the long stretches of extraordinary effort that make extraordinary flashes resonate.
This is why I keep writing. Keep searching. Keep experimenting with rhythm, cadence, metaphor, transparency, and truth – knowing that somewhere lies the next line that lifts me from my seat. Perhaps it will even be one of mine.
The same pursuit animates Oxygen Conservation. We are not here for mediocrity or adequacy. We are here to Scale Conservation so that, every now and then, nature itself produces transcendent moments: the return of a species, the restoration of a forest, the rebirth of a landscape, and yes – even the sale of the world’s most valuable carbon credits.
The great performances of history – on the court, on the track, in the pool, or on the page – remind me that this pursuit is worth the effort. Goosebump moments are rare, but when they arrive, they render everything else worthwhile.
So, I will keep writing. Keep lifting. Keep searching. Because somewhere in the words, somewhere in the work, another transcendent moment awaits.