this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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I've been thinking about this more and more over the past ten years. And I don't mean to diminish the importance this person had in your life and the life of others.
I believe most of us look up to people like her and Jimmy Carter for example. The mistake I believe most of us tend to make is we do not view ourselves as a positive force. To put it another way, we believe that we could never live up to all the good things these people have done. Basically, we beat ourselves up for not being like these people.
Generally speaking, we all can be a positive force in this world. It's just all the little things that we can do, in an entire lifetime, that adds up to a great deal of good. For example, when I'm out at the local grocery store I smile and say hello to random people. I engage in friendly conversation with the cashier. And then I say goodbye and have a great day.
I'm sure that we all can think of hundreds of other examples that seem small. However, when you do all of these little things over a period of many years it adds up to a lot of goodness and positivity.
<3 I have a hard time believing that a conversation between us would be intended as anything but constructive.
Despite being deep in the feels of the day, I agree with you; I try my best to be that force for good as well, and live up to being the person she and other people have believed me to be capable of. There are days it's difficult to see myself the way I view them, because of how well I can see my own faults and mistakes. That's not to say that they didn't have those same types of self perception, but those foibles seem larger when we're looking at ourselves, I think.
I have high hopes of being that kind of role model, dare I say, hero to our daughter. My wife surely feels the same drive in her own way. But there's something about having a grandmother figure who lived through desegregation and suffrage that seems, I dunno, grander (or at least more impactful) and it saddens me that she'll only know her through memories, rather than firsthand.