. . . a better place
Leave your world a better place than you found it.
When I was almost five years old, I would go next door to spend the night with my friend, Peetie. She and I would laugh and play for hours most days. Whenever I was getting ready to go to Peetie’s house, my dad would say to me, Don’t make a mess. Leave it better than you found it. At the time, I thought this meant to clean up our toys, clean up after ourselves, make my bed, all the things an almost five-year-old is becoming aware of from day to day. But as the years passed, his message found its way in to everything I did whenever I left the front door. When I went out the door to school, when I went to play in the desert, when I went to play with the neighborhood kids, he’d say, Whatever you do today, leave it better than you found it. Those words stayed with me.
Those words became a mantra for me. They became a way of approaching the world and all I did in it. Long after he had passed, his words carried me ahead challenge after challenge. Each house I moved into needed to become a home, need to be made better than I found it. Each classroom I entered, each path I wandered, each forest I explored, each thing I did became an opportunity to enact his words: wherever you are in the world, leave it a better place than you found it.
These words have shaped my hands at work, shaped my mind and how I think about what I do, and have shaped my vision and how I see life. To leave some small moment, some corner in my journey, better than I found it means to leave a small indelible gift in my passage through this world. Helping a student find understanding, seeing the light come on in her eyes, encouraging her as she faces a fear, these small moments make a difference. They enact the spirit behind my father’s thought: leave it better than you found it.
So in the short time I spent with my parents, I was stained with their words, with their way of being in the world, and I am a better person than I would have been without that wisdom. In those few years, I now understand, I learned the value of building things, of reading and understanding, of continuing to learn something new every day. I value the focus, the effort, the intention of being in a place and wanting to leave it better than I found it, and of wanting to make myself a better person in the process, even though that process has taken longer than I’d hoped it would.
Our words shape others, especially others whom we love. They act slowly, but they imprint on others deep kindnesses, enabling them to do more, to do better, to learn to give, too. Our words have subtle power to shape those around us the way our hands can shape our place in this world—to leave it and those we love better than they were when we arrived.
In that one small way, my father showed his love for me and my siblings. His love shaped within us this positive way of seeing the world, a gift we needed after he passed. And he left the world, and his loved ones, better for having been here. May I do the same on my journey. So may we all.