When I was a boy, I garbed my speech, mumbled out words, and occasionally slurred. I never thought I had a speech impediment, nor did I regard myself as having a learning disability. It was rather that I felt slightly ill at ease around others, perhaps presumed a twinge of hostility from my interlocutor, and my speech—rushed, clipped—reflected my mental state.

I was thinking of this while my wife Alexandra and I were watching Stallone play Rocky in Rocky I very recently. Seeing the movie again last week about 50 years after it first came out, I couldn’t help but feel for the guy. There were some scenes in which I could barely make out what Stallone was saying. Some of it, to be sure, was his thick Philly accent, but some of it was his speech impediment exposing itself. By 1976, Stallone was already pretty “beat up by life.”

What really helped me begin to get over my garble was a bespoke, self-taught course on eloquence. I made it up, and I practiced a ton. In 2006, I moved in with my then-girlfriend who was going to medical school in St. Louis. I was ABD (“all but dissertation”—read: poor), and I needed to get paid, so I secured a lectureship position at St. Louis Community College-Forest Park as well as a tutoring position at Kaplan, where I taught the MCAT to pre-med students at Wash U. in St. Louis.

You’d have no reason to know what a strange tango this was. At Forest Park, I was teaching some of the poorest students in the nation. Period. Meanwhile, at Wash U., I was, for 3 hours straight, lecturing some of the wealthiest. How was I going to reach both?

I learned to sloooooow down my speech, to hit upon a diction that suited my audience, and, above all, to e-nun-ci-ate. Over and over again, I would mentally rehearse different ways of saying the same thing, crafting thoughts in parallel forms, learning smooth transitions, making my thoughts as precise as possible, sharpening the periods between sentences. I wanted speech to sound really polished—as if it were beautiful writing, though completely improvised. I had to get my mouth to ratchet open more; my tongue needed to be be more dexterous, more facile. I had, not the least, to let go of some of the alienation I felt from others. I had to lighten up. Years later, while living in California, I even taught eloquence as a key to self-knowledge.

Twenty years later, one result of this crash course in eloquence is this audiobook: Chop Wood, Carry Water: The Yoga of Work. On October 7th, I headed to a recording studio here in Florida. It was just so much fun to jam. I never thought that I’d be, as it were, a musician—at least for a few hours. Then I had an audio engineer based in Austin, Texas, put the thing together nicely.

It was amazing to hear the two samples that bookend this piece. If you’d like, you can find and listen to the book in its entirety on Amazon and Audible.

I can still hear the faintest signs of mumbling or garbling or rushedness in these samples, but these too are dear to me. “I don’t mind what happens,” Kristanmurti once said. Neither do I.