The very nature of geochemistry is a grand challenge, since it has the ambition to identify and to gain an in depth understanding of the mechanisms by which the different chemical reservoirs on Earth, the Solar System and beyond, both formed and continue to evolve (Langmuir and Broecker, 2012). Indeed, Earth is unlikely to remain a viable habitat for life as we know it as the Sun declines as an energy source and chemicals continually leak from the atmosphere into space (Kasting, 2010). This may take another 1.5 billion years, so there is time for our descendants to find and colonize another planet, and for we current low temperature and pressure (LTP) geochemists to have a little more fun and find fascination in our attempts to understand how the myriad of interconnected geochemical reservoirs we study evolve over both time and space. Life is an important geochemical driver in most, if not all, of the environments at or near the Earth's surface. There is an adage that where there is water, there is life (Priscu et al., 1998), and it is a truism that microbes serve to catalyze REDOX reactions, gaining energy for vital processes as a consequence (Madigan et al., 2003). The merry-go-round of geochemical transformations at the Earth's surface is swung in part by life, which is persistent in many forms once it is established (Holland, 1984). We LTP geochemists have the privilege of observing the constitution of the chemical reservoirs we study, from scales that range from sub-nanometers, the spaces between atoms in minerals, to thousands of kilometers, the scale of continents, to light years in the galaxy. Our time scales can equally range from nanoseconds for high energy reactions to the billions of years of chemical differentiation within the Universe. Some would say that an interest in chemicals over these scales and times is the soulless preserve of geeks. We in the thick of it see sparks that trigger our imagination and fill us with awe of the fluxes, transformations, and microbial diversity in the biogeochemical systems that we research. It is another adage that you never stop learning: just when we feel that we have a good understanding of the systems we are studying, some unexpected isotope variation, an anomalous minor element concentration or the mass balance of particular reactions just do not make sense, and we are forced to rethink our biogeochemical view of how our systems stay in balance, or near-steady state. Low temperature geochemists have a phenomenal legacy of inspirational texts. My 30-something years of research are punctuated with reading landmark texts that gave me a sense of just how earth systems self-regulate, and gave me the courage to try to change the view of how my particular subject area was perceived by the wider research community. Here are a few examples. Just how the rock cycle results in chemical differentiation was laid out simply, dramatically, and with such elegance in the Evolution of Sedimentary Rocks (Garrels and Mackenzie, 1971). Bob Garrels also co-wrote a seminal volume on how basic chemical principles could be applied to water-rock interactions (Garrels and Christ, 1965), exemplifying the spectrum of length and time scales that geochemists work with almost simultaneously. Heinrich Holland showed how