Travelled to Boston this week and watched a documentary about the birth of America.
Washington. Boone. Crockett. Jackson. The men on the holiday poster.
I absolutely love that story. The courage. The grit. A continent opening up for people who refused to wait for permission.
But the more I read, the clearer one thing became.
The founding was not clean. The same people capable of extraordinary courage were capable of terrible things. Sometimes in the same week. The best of us and the worst of us have always lived in the same body.
I am not celebrating a finished country this Fourth. I am celebrating an unfinished one. An argument a brave and flawed people started, and handed to us, still going.
Here is what I keep coming back to.
Nothing worth building has ever been built alone. Not a country. Not a company. Certainly not a life.
My Dad Wayne L. Smith II and Mom believed before there was any proof. My brother Colin Smith has been in the foxhole since day one. My wife Ashley Bailey-Smith carries more than anyone I know and still shows up for everyone around her. And my daughter, who just needed her dad present. That one thing reordered everything else.
The winding road is still a road. The people on it are the whole point.
That is true of a country. It is true of a business. It is even more true of a life.
Happy 4th.
#ChipChats #July4th #Gratitude