Legacy - Living Beyond Your Own Life
I mentioned in a previous observation that our culture currently defines a legacy as a financial gift left behind to beneficiaries. This implies, of course, that something one leaves behind after death can only be valued in terms of money, and that if isn’t money, well, then it ain’t valuable. This is utter nonsense, and serves to highlight the woes of our current world. But that’s not why we’re here.
We’re here to start a different conversation about life and death. We’re here to pave new roads, to make new pathways, and traverse new terrain. So let’s take a look then at what a legacy is and what it does.
As I said above, a legacy - regardless of what some enterprising attorney will tell you - has absolutely nothing to do with money. Yes, it’s true, people do leave money behind when they go, since money is a social construct that we have created within this realm of conscious agents and it isn’t transferrable beyond the veil. However, it is only an imagined commodity, and it benefits only certain entities that remain, not all of them. There is much much more to leaving a legacy than just mere dollars. In fact, you can be penniless and still leave a legacy - one that will resonate long after you’ve departed.
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A legacy is a story - and it is built one generation at a time. That’s a very simple definition, and I’m certain scholars will argue it, but legacies are essentially whispers of testimony of the fact that the departed - someone like you - lived. And even the most financially impoverished people can leave a legacy. It involves creating the beginning of a story that is uniquely yours - and seeing it continue with the people who are coming behind you. It means beginning something that you know you’ll never finish; planting a seed perhaps whose harvest you know you will never reap. But you also know that the harvest of the seed you may plant isn’t necessarily meant for you anyway. It is meant for those who come afterward, and that its only your job to launch it.
I’m sure by now you’re already playing little movies of ideas in your head that could be the story that you start. Can you plant seeds that eradicate racial tension? Yes! Can you begin to sew love instead of hatred - even when it hurts to do so? Yes you can! Can you reimagine our concepts of things like sadness, hopelessness and despair and instead recreate these into hope, joy and fearlessness? Absolutely. And then, when you’ve radically redefined these ideas within your own heart, can you teach them to someone - anyone - else? YES.
That is a legacy. It’s beginning a narrative that reaches beyond yourself - beyong the span of time that corresponds to your own biological life. It is understanding that change is not the endeavor of only one lifetime - it is the collective conjoining of many - over multitudes of millenia, until history is rewritten, and the human story evolves. It sounds magnanimous and trite, perhaps. Maybe it sounds idealistic and naive. But ask yourself this: for all our non-profit funding, our charitable giving, our volunteering, our picketing, our protesting - where is the improvement in the conditions for which we employ these concepts? Is poverty vanishing? Is racial tension disappearing? Are wars still being fought in the name of religion and politics? I'm sure you'll find, as I have, that the answer is a resounding yes. Isn’t it time, then, that we tried a different approach?
Legacies are stories that are not yet fully written. Their path through history depends upon the input of many many resources - not just you. Your legacy - what you will leave behind when you go - will be the beginning of something that continues after you have departed. But it must look beyond the span of your biological life. Teach your children (or the children of others) to stop describing other human beings by the color of their skin. Teach them to forgive quickly when wrongs are done them - and often. Let your legacy be the beginning of a story that leads toward a peaceful summit - and not a continuation of the bleak narrative in which we are currently engaged. Dare to realize that the impact you are making is not meant to be felt by you - but by those who come after you. When you begin to shift your thinking in this way, you start to see with greater clarity. And your life takes on a different meaning.
Remember: legacies are the unfinished projects that we start but leave behind for others to finish. They are not bound by the paradigm of money or the concept of finances at all. They are of far greater importance than we have known. If enough of us begin to leave legacies - real ones, that is, not the kind made of money - then the world will change by default. When we teach others - namely those who come behind us - the lessons we have learned the hard way through suffering , we are looking beyond ourselves. We are assigning value to a story in which we are not the sole author.
Leaving a legacy means being a part of something much larger than yourself, and realizing that the only person in the entire chain of history who can make your contribution is you. And it continues on, beyond biological death, into a future which is yet unestablished.