Better Than We Found It
The Lines in the Human Story We Each Get to Write
If you cannot find faith in humanity, be the faith in humanity. – Anonymous
Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them. – Oliver Wendell Holmes
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. – The First Letter to the Corinthians, 13:13
If you’re at all familiar with my writing or my life, you’ve no doubt heard me mention my grandmother, the protagonist of Me and Mary and the subject of posts like Mary’s Table. Despite her diminutive stature, never raising her voice and her work as a domestic for a family that lived “over the mountain” (the local euphemism for “wealthy and white”), she had a bearing that, like I imagine Harriet Tubman or Rosa Parks, commanded respect from just about everyone – even in places like racially conflicted Alabama.
In Getting Here, the first chapter of Me and Mary, I tell the story of my arrival. Mary, after being told that I, her severely premature grandson was unlikely to survive quit riding the bus and started saving her bus fare, along with S&H Green Stamps, to buy me a blanket:
When I came home, it was going to be in one of those nice blankets like the wealthy kids get – not some flimsy disposable version. This was her own way of affirming a set of truths that she’d come to know in her bones – that I was loved, that I was valuable, that I was as good as any other kid coming out of that hospital, and that I would come out. Each morning that she opted to walk to work, rather than take the bus, and each evening that she spent talking with me through the glass, she was making her faith manifest; grounding me, by sheer force of will, in this place, and in her heart.
Mary, a colored woman in the South, had a sixth-grade education, which was actually more than many white-identifying men of her era. But it wasn’t her intelligence I remember most; it was her wisdom. And as the wisest person I’ve ever known, she, of course, had sayings:
Even a little bit of poison won’t kill you. Never badmouth anybody – it says more about you than about them. If God puts someone in your path, it’s your job to love them. Good and bad don’t know color. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Never spend money you ain’t got. God don’t like ugly. A stitch in time saves nine.
Always buy good shoes.
Like a trust fund, I’ve drawn down on those hard-won insights my entire life. And in every way, I’m better for it. But the saying I seem to turn to most is, Leave things better than you found them. At some point, I realized that this applied not just to borrowing a friend’s car or putting items back where they belong in the supermarket; we can leave the world itself better than we found it.
Of all the wonderful advice imparted to me, this would become a cornerstone of my life. I’d seek to leave everyone, from the stranger on the street to the loves of my life, and everything, from the work I’ve done to the places I’ve lived, better than I found them. I’d remember to remove my trash from the movie theater because someone like my uncle Don would have to clean up whatever I left behind. (I’d also make it a habit of checking that my wallet hadn’t fallen out during the movie.)
I’d remember to say thank you to the cashier, and to call them by their name, or leave a hefty tip for the maid at a budget motel. This even became a bit of a prayer for me:
Help me, oh God, throughout this day, to be my best self in every way. I choose the path of heartfulness; that all I encounter, I will bless.
Granted, I’m not always successful, but simply by aspiring to embody this spiritual principle – recognizing the power we each possess to incarnate faith, hope and love into the world, the more conscious of it I become. And by working at it, I’m increasingly aware of how often I’ve moved through my life, oblivious to the harm I’m rendering. Having no regard for our spiritual footprint, for our impact on others and on the world, means that we’re unaware of what’s left in our wake.
I can think of no better example of someone getting this right than my friend Danny.
Last time I saw him, Danny had completely changed his life. He’d left his job in the world of banking; a job that made him lots of money but never made him happy. He’d traded in the Brooks Brothers suit for bargain jeans and flannel, the private stylist for a buzz cut he gave himself, and manicured nails for workingman’s hands. It had been well over a decade since I’d seen him. He answered the door of his apartment over the garage, barefoot and red-bearded, with an adorable mocha-colored toddler wearing an oxygen tube on his hip.
Turned out he’d bought a piece of property, turned the home into a halfway house, and the garage into a food pantry. Danny had donated all his money to the project and lived on the same income as everyone else who worked there. The kid he was carrying with the confidence of someone who was completely at ease caring for sick infants was the child of one of the women in the program.
You’d think that the physical changes in him would be the most startling, but they weren’t. What stood out was the contentment that radiated off him. I’d never seen Danny happier. We had a wonderful visit, and later, I’d reflect, “This was the line in our human story that Danny was using his life to write.”
We all get one; a line. In the introduction of This Land Is Your Land, I describe it like this: “Over America’s existence, there have been approximately 545 million lives lived; all of which have shaped us – some have made us better, and others, worse. But every life left its mark, on America, and on who America is because of them.”
And while we don’t have to do what Danny’s doing to make a difference, for each of us, there’s a difference that only we can make. We can leave things better than we found them. This is how we shape not only the fate of a nation but of the world.
Lady A, in their song, I Was Here, said it this way: “I wanna do something that matters; something that says I was here.” That, more than anything, is my prayer for each of us, and for all of us.