Words to Live By

My dad read a lot. He read poetry, classic literature, the Bible, Reader’s Digest, GQ, how-to books up the wazoo, books about gardening, books about clocks, books about books, you name it. He seemed to know about everything.

But deep down in the 20,000 leagues of knowledge, there was one bit of wisdom that seemed to rise to the top not just in the telling but in the living:

From what I remember, my dad credited his mother and her mother with handing down this quote to him. I won’t say he never said anything bad about anybody, but it was relatively rare. He made it a habit to find the good in people. The phrase I keep coming back to is that he delighted in people. As a rule, he just enjoyed life.

But I think it’s that little saying and the way he lived it that will stay with me the most. It wasn’t that he ignored people’s faults or excused them or acted as though everyone was equally good. He just made it a habit, a lifestyle, really, to see the good in everyone. He didn’t frame his understanding of people according to the attributes or opinions most likely to indict them.

He loved people. He found the good in them. He was aware of the bad. He was undyingly curious about everyone.

Sometimes I think our expectations of perfection and our social media training puts us in call-out mode way too often (this isn’t new, of course, the internets just give our judgments a different medium). Calling out bad ideas and behavior has its place, but we are more than our bad takes and misdeeds. There is so much good in the worst of us. There is so much bad in the best of us. There is so much more than fault to find in the rest of us.