When Your Mind is Set on Fire

Did you know that the brain is usually one of the first organs to decompose after death? Unless of course, you were in Pompeii in the year 79, and were an unfortunately incinerated victim of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Recently scientists announced the discovery of a vitrified brain from that ancient, volcanic blast — a brain that had been liquefied at a high heat, and then rapidly cooled to create a glass-like substance. How Chamber is that? How commerce? How… poetic?

Have you often felt the heat of passion for what you do — working on a new idea, or successfully completing a project, a big sale? The fire in such passion can glass your brain into a cut crystal where even the weakest Pacific Northwest sun will shoot rainbows of possibilities across your office wall.

Or perhaps have you felt the frustration of not being able to move a project forward, of being discounted, disrespected, disenfranchised? That, too, is a kind of scorching passion, glass as black as an obsidian knife which could cut such smallness out of our lives.

In either case, extreme bursts of internal heat, those eruptions of passion -- controlled or maybe just wild — do turn our brains into metaphorical glass. This is the hot lava of our lives.

Our minds can be the kind of glass that refracts the light within us, celebrating our connections to people and ideas and issues. Each of us can choose to turn the heat of our own unique spark up to such a flaming blaze that any darkness lurking in our brain melts away, and we become a bright, looking glass of who we are and what we can be.

As for the Chamber’s heart and mind, what can I say? I believe when science gives us brittle, black shards of volcanic brain, it’s more than a work metaphor. It’s poetry we can live by.

And, as very passionate members of the Chamber of Commerce, I think we can all agree. When your brain is sizzling with ideas and you are looking for the cooling breeze of success, all you have to do is…Take the Federal Way!