We were hours deep into a conversation that hopped across weeks. From moment to moment, like a child’s feet, gleefully finding stones across flowing water. We had come to know each other a little and there was comfort and ease enough to speak towards truth without fear of difference.
He brought the topic of legacy, feeling that his purpose would be meaningless if he didn’t leave greater well being for others. A pleasingly fresh look at legacy. More loam than stratosphere. Yet he was reaching for something that he felt he had not achieved. Something grand to behold, seen by many and celebrated throughout the ages. His lament was a sadness of self that had colonised him. If you don’t achieve everything it can feel like you have achieved nothing.
We talked some more. If a much lauded triumph happens around our lives and is witnessed and heralded throughout the lands then so be it. A wonderful expression of life. We might call such a happening, think of them, imagine them to be personal. To be of our making. To be of us. To be our legacy. Of course everything we are involved in is of us but only ever partly of us.
Each of us can call to mind the thought of people we have never met, who we know through third hand experience. We know the experiences they had as expressed through their music, writing, art, actions, performance, policy, personality and so on. It has become easy to imagine that being known in this way is the only way to be known and the only worthwhile way to be known.
We forget that the world already knows us whether it is broadcast or not. In a tangible, sensed, felt, energetic way. In a very real way we leave our legacy in every moment that we move through and all of life, all of existence knows what that legacy is. We are never unknown. We are always known. We are witnessed as we are witness. Everything that exists is in constant exchange with itself and you are an intrinsic part of that, belonging to it in an irrevocable way since, well, forever.
Perhaps we don’t need to strive so hard for our legacy. It is there already. In every action. In every interaction. In every contraction and expansion of breath that becomes part of the world and returns as us. Be what you are. Do what you do. Whatever that is, be content with the exchange and the indelible, eternal legacy you are and, if it concerns you, that the world will know when your body dies. By being the way we are we can bring our energy to the world and let it spill, ripple and soak those around us. If it helps we can, but we don’t have to, demand the attention of others for that to happen. It is always happening, whether we intend it or not. Our lives are laid bare before all of life.
Every life is equally meaningful and is known and remembered through life itself as it continues. That is our legacy. Our innate legacy. Our born legacy. All of life, every animal, every plant, every insect, every microbe, every conversation between humans.
A strand of our hop-skip-stepping stone conversation had been exploring small ways in which to bring well being to others. We considered together, the most intimate, immediate, sensory scale at which we had opportunities to foster our legacy each day. Saying hello to fellow dog walkers each morning, being unnecessarily nice to accountants by e-mail, letting the daddy long-legs spiders keep their webs in the lofty corners of the room, sharing the path with people in all walks of life as they go about their living.
Just like that we found, between us, some new way of observing our incarnate, humble place in the world. That we might not have found alone. In our ordinary lives. The lives of no one. Leaving without fail, the legacy of no one.
