Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.
Dear 100-year-old me,
I wonder what kind of world is holding you now. When I write this, we are living in an age of appetite: a world that always wants more—more wealth, more comfort, more power—without asking what that hunger is doing to us. I hope that by your time we learnt that greed does not create abundance, only emptiness. I hope people became less obsessed with accumulation and more committed to care.
I wonder, too, what became of all those lives you invested in. You were always more interested in helping people grow than in building your own name. Did it matter? I hope that by 100 you can see what is hard to see from here: that encouragement took root, that confidence grew, that lives opened up because someone believed in them. Perhaps that was always the real work.
And what of the planet? We knew we were addicted to fossil fuels, trapped by convenience and reluctant to change. Did we find better ways to live and move? Did the world become cleaner, gentler? I hope so.
I also wonder whether humanity ever learnt that power crushes and love builds up. In my time, the spectre of war was never far away. Did we loosen our grip on domination? Did we learn that peace, mercy, and compassion are stronger than force?
If the world is still mixed—both beautiful and broken—I hope you did not let that harden you. I hope you kept planting things, kept encouraging people, and kept believing that small acts of faithfulness still matter. Perhaps that is how any better future is made.
The Afterword 
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