In April, I graduated from the Multicultural Leadership Program offered by the Bloomington-Normal Multicultural Leadership Institute in Illinois, USA. One assignment I completed as part of the program was to write my “Inspirational Story” and share it with the class. This was a hard assignment for me mostly because, as I writer, I had a hard time deciding which story to tell. I finally decided to focus on a theme and then choose elements that would support that theme. (That’s the English teacher in me kicking in!) What follows is the story I finally wrote and shared with my class back in February of 2023:
When I was a kid, my dad loved to take us on long road trips across the country. He had a thing for state capitols, and I have visited the state capitol building of almost every single state I have ever set foot in.
On one such trip, our family of six stopped at a rest area along the interstate and piled out of our old Buick LeSabre to head to the restrooms. A flattened cigarette pack in the parking lot caught my attention, and something told me to pick it up. I had no sooner done so than I heard that other voice in my head – the nagging one that most of us have that sounds like one or both of our parents – “What are you doing? Put that down, that’s disgusting. Why are you playing with trash?”
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Write on the World 