The most powerful legacy in the world...

I was just walking...we have this really beautiful little park a couple of blocks away...train tracks near the entrance...a river at the back...playground equipment, including swings (particularly important playground equipment to me:):)...

I like to walk...I walk a lot...those who know me know that it is one of my important pasttimes...

And I realized...

How much I fully loved my life...

What an incredible and proud legacy...this legacy of ideas...that I'm a part of...just what a powerful legacy it is...the most powerful...the most important...the most influential, for obvious reasons...and the legacy that I and I think any person can be most proudly affiliated with...

Do you realize how many fewer wars there are today than in antiquity?...or even just a hundred years ago...or 50 years ago?...

How something as basic as war...something that has been with humanity since it's beginning...and much more frequent, arbitrary, and destructive in the past...for which politics, in its beginnings, was developed as an alternative...

How something as basic and destructive as war...

Has been diminished dramatically...

By the idea...that it could...

Powerful...

And my ideas contribute to diminishing that even further...as far as possible...or as far as I can see, at least...at this point in my life...whatever can reduce it's propensity more...I hope some whippersnapper comes along and kicks my lilly-white ass to develop better ideas to do it...

Do you know how powerful that is?...to know that you are part of that legacy?...

Or the legacy of those developing ideas to improve education?...or reduce crime?...or to promote more freedom so that other people have a more conducive environment for curing diseases...developing medicines...developing technologies?...

Do you know how powerful it is to think that you are doing work that can help people find more authentic love?...build stronger families...be stronger individuals?...be more at peace with themselves...for real?...

Work that can offer people the opportunity to face themselves more honestly and with more courage?...to help people forgive...and love...and live lives with more decency and compassion?...to help victims and perpetrators of even the most serious and gruesome crimes -- murder, genocide, rape, torture -- to face themselves...and one another...and to learn to have the courage to forgive...for themselves...and for one another...for victims to forgive perpetrators...and for perpetrators to face and forgive themselves...

And...in the course of that...to prevent those kinds of crimes in the future...by those same perpetrators...and by others...and by facilitating, better, their capture to face their crimes...and the victims they have left behind...

Ideas that can increase productivity in businesses and non-profits and all kinds of groups and organizations to deal with their central purposes...to increase the purposefullness and ingenuity and creativity and feeling of self-satisfaction that each of the members of those groups can feel in doing their work...and...as a consequence...do far better, more creative work...much of which we never would have anticipated without their freedom to engage in it...

Ideas that can better satisfy the material, political, social, personal and emotional needs of humanity?...

Do realize how powerful it is to be a part of that legacy?...

It is the most powerful legacy, actually...

The greatest...

And that is the reason why since I was a fairly young guy...I've always wanted to be a part of it...

And I have never felt prouder...of myself...of my efforts...of my accomplishments...

And happier...more content...more at peace...with my life...ever before in my life...

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...

The courage to change the things I can...

And the wisdom to know the difference...

And out of that little prayer...

Is reaped everything...

I have never loved my life more...or the people in it...

And I am so proud to be a part of that legacy...

Have a great evening, everyone...

Love,
Ben