To be in your children’s memories tomorrow, you have to be in their lives today.
—Barbara Johnson
Whether you know it or not, whether you knew them or not, your grandparents have had a significant impact on your life. They did that through the values they instilled in their children—your parents. And now you’re passing many of those lessons on to your own kids.
That’s one person having an impact on three generations. When you think about it like that, it’s not an exaggeration to say that your grandparents quite literally changed the world. And they did it in the smallest of ways—with just a few conversations, with how they went to work every day, with the books they read in the evening and the manners they displayed at dinner. They did it in the conversations they had when their kids made mistakes. They did it in how they treated their neighbors and mowed their lawns and plowed their driveways.
There are lots of things we can do to change the world. We should try to do all of them. But we have to know—and we can never forget—how much impact we can have on the world right here at home. Through our children, their children, and their children’s children, we have profound multigenerational legacy.
That’s an incredible power. Don’t neglect it.