Often how you define the problem will determine whether or not you're able to find a real solution.

We're all born listeners. And as a result of our modern lives, and living in a world that has less meaning than the natural world that we evolved to hear, we learn to think of listening not as taking in all the information with equal value, which is the definition of true listening. In our modern world, we tend to think of listening as focusing our attention on what is important and filtering out everything else.

The most important thing for our species is, before it speaks, to listen to its environment. That has a higher priority in any species' survival. We need to be listening to our environment - in other words, restoring the quiet - not just to our natural areas, but also to towns like Portland, Maine.

If you're listening to a symphony, you're getting all the information, including the audience around you, the delay from the sides of the concert hall, the whole thing. If one of those musicians is sharply out of tune or starts to play a different piece of music than all the others in the orchestra, you immediately notice. When you analyze systems by listening, you can just listen, and you can tell whether the system is healthy or unhealthy. What I've created for you is a perfect model of how we should be listening to our stock market, rather than trying to see it graphically.

What visual information does is it creates priorities. You cannot know with certainty what lies behind something else. There are very few transparent materials in the natural world or the built environment. And so we deal with things superficially, and we deal with what's in front of us, not what's behind our head that we can't see, or to the left or the right. Visualists are often linear and timeline-oriented, whereas the natural condition and the natural way of problem-solving throughout evolution is to be multitasking.

I've never really understood how people cannot value the future, or think that the world is going down a fast slippery slope of degradation. No, I don't think so; this is just what it's going to take to wake us up, and allow us to do what our ancestors did. You know, our ancestors brought us here by tooth and claw. A lot of people perished, a lot of pre-humans perished. Life has never been easy. Why should it be easy for us?

Quiet is the element of discerning what is essential.