Perpetuate Better Living
Posettes Trail, Chamonix, France
As I sipped a delightful brew the other day, my attention was pulled into the beautiful graphics on my beer bottle. I noticed the slogan from the small Oregon brewery—Ninkasi—and was struck by how profound it was:
"Perpetuate Better Living"
Photo: Ninkasi
Perpetuate
To "perpetuate" means to make something last as long as possible, and potentially, even forever. If something is "perpetual," it goes on without ceasing, without a break.
One of the main ways that humanity perpetuates things is by spreading them to others. The best way to perpetuate something, whether it's your DNA, an idea, or a way of life, is to spread it around so that you're not the sole carrier of the thing in question.
If you can spread better living throughout your entire life and even to the lives of people around you, it has that much better of a chance of perpetuating.
Better
"Better" feels self-explanatory, but the best definition for the word in this usage is: "to a greater degree; more completely or thoroughly."
In this sentence, "better" modifies "living," and it means that this "living" gets a little bit more complete and more excellent than it used to be. But this use of "better" keeps on being applied, day after day and week after week.
With "better," you never fully arrive at the conclusion. You instead continue to improve every single day until the day you die—never ceasing, never giving up.
You never arrive at "best." You're just continually improving on what you currently have.
Living
"Living," used as a noun in this case, covers all of the things that you actually do in your life. These are the actions that you take, the way you spend your time, the things you choose to do (or not do).
Notice that we aren't being exhorted to perpetuate better thinking. We aren't even exhorted to improve our belief system or our opinions and attitudes.
What actually matters is what we do, how we spend our time on this planet day-to-day. I think one of the most important things that we can do in our lives is to go outside and move our bodies through nature, day in and day out.
Perpetuate Better Living
From this slogan, we learn that our day-to-day living can indeed be improved, and this betterness can spread out in our lives. It can even spread to others around us, helping their lives to become just a little bit better too, and maybe the people around them can become a little bit better as well.
It's a pretty extraordinary slogan in that way.
Perpetuate better living.
