dailygood.org · 1 hour ago

Edmund Benson: Constructive Aging, Positivity Cards and More, by Awakin Call Editors | Dailygood

Edmund Benson grew up the self-described "black sheep" of his family, a troubled child who found his early education not in classrooms but in the rougher company of the Merchant Marine - learning, as he puts it, "mostly what not to do." That a man shaped by such beginnings would spend his retirement building life-skills programs for hundreds of thousands of at-risk youth, then turn 80 and give the entire curriculum away for free so it could be "translated into any language" and placed "in the hands, hearts, and heads of as many people as possible," is itself a quiet kind of miracle. But what makes Benson's story linger is not the scale of his accomplishment - the four million documented hours of lessons, the street named in his honor, the 264 positivity cards still tucked into strangers' wallets - it is the thread running beneath all of it: that transformation rarely announces itself, but tends to arrive through a wife's offhand complaint about a smell, a card handed to him by a stranger forty years before he understood why it mattered, a former Marine captain being ignored in a circle of men. "The goal has always been to share," Benson says simply, and in his telling it sounds less like a philosophy than a fact of nature - the only logical response to a life that gave him so much to pass on.