Making the World a Better Place

Son,

You want to make the world a better place. That’s what you want to do when you grow up. You see injustices on the news and you immediately want to go out and personally fix them. You want to feed the starving, you want to personally disarm the armies of the countries at war and tell them all to stop – to be friends. You want to house the homeless, bring home all the stray, unwanted or cruelly treated dogs.

You want to make the world a better place.

What you don’t realise is that you already do. I tell you how wonderful you make my world and sometimes I think you just think I’m being an incredibly uncool Dad.

But you do. You make the world amazing. And not just my world… Every single time you pick up toys dropped from pushchairs in the street and chase the parents to return them to the babies, you make them smile. Every single time you hold doors in shops open for old people (or pretty girls) you make them smile. Every time you tell the pretty girls in the shops that you like the smell of their perfume or that you think their hair is pretty, you make them smile.

I have no doubt you will change the world when you’re older, one way or another. But just because you can’t go out disarming those at war and rehoming every single dog on the planet right now doesn’t mean that you don’t make the world better already. Sometimes making the world better is just a series of small contributions… if everybody on the planet made 5 other people a day smile, that would be a whole lot of happiness in distribution.

You make every single person you come into contact with smile, son.

The world is better because you’re in it. And my heart is fuller, my smile is wider, my life is a happier one because of you.

As I’ve said so many time before, you’re the greatest gift I’ve ever received.

I’ll always love you even more than humous.

Your incredibly uncool, occasionally soppy and eternally doting Dad xx