Improvement
Poem by Edgar Albert Guest
The joy of life is living it, or so it seems to me;
In finding shackles on your wrists, then struggling till you’re free;
In seeing wrongs and righting them, in dreaming splendid dreams,
Then toiling till the vision is as real as moving streams.
The happiest mortal on the earth is he who ends his day
By leaving better than he found to bloom along the way.
Were all things perfect here there would be naught for man to do;
If what is old were good enough we’d never need the new.
The only happy time of rest is that which follows strife
And sees some contribution made unto the joy of life.
And he who has oppression felt and conquered it is he
Who really knows the happiness and peace of being free.
The miseries of earth are here and with them all must cope.
Who seeks for joy, through hedges thick of care and pain must grope.
Through disappointment man must go to value pleasure’s thrill;
To really know the joy of health a man must first be ill.
The wrongs are here for man to right, and happiness is had
By striving to supplant with good the evil and the bad.
The joy of life is living it and doing things of worth,
In making bright and fruitful all the barren spots of earth.
In facing odds and mastering them and rising from defeat,
And making true what once was false, and what was bitter, sweet.
For only he knows perfect joy whose little bit of soil
Is richer ground than what it was when he began to toil.
What is a good life? What is the measure of a life well lived? These are questions that we all ask as we navigate our way through life. And for me, I like to reframe the question to the following: “When my time is up and I pass on from this life, what do I want to be remembered for and what kind of person do I want to be remembered as? And the answer is simple; I want to be remembered for having left this world a better place than when I came into it. I want to leave a positive footprint. I also want to be remembered as a person who shared love in a world full of hate. This is my legacy in the making. . .what will yours be?
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