What's Your Legacy?

These days, aging athletes, actors, politicos and pop culture figures seem more inclined than ever to wax poetic about their legacy as their careers draw down to their conclusion. All too often, the idea of your legacy seems to only begin to carry much weight after you’ve already formed that legacy in the minds of your peers.

In this life, people eventually come to grips with the limited life expectancy of everything in our world, be it human life, a career, a job-within-a-job or associations.  We have relationships that form as part of phases of our lives and we all too often don’t consider how we will be remembered when that period has ended until it is too late to actually effect change in that area.

How will people remember you when this season of your life has passed? What’s your legacy? 

It’s the footprint you’ve left long after you have moved on and enough time has passed that the even the vision of your physical appearance has blurred. It’s what lasts about you until even after your bones are only a whisper of dust.

After you’ve moved on, people will forget the nuances of your daily life; the funny habits, quips and stories that accompany you will fade. They won’t be able to forget how you made them feel or the difference you made for them, whether good or bad. They won’t forget the broad strokes. They won’t lose sight of the big picture of who you were to them.

I have been uniquely given the gift of life circumstances that have caused me to ponder my own mortality on multiple occasions. As many of you know, I nearly died at twenty in a car wreck, and a bit over a year later my father died. Either of those events would be enough to effect pause, but combined they forced me to take long periods of reflection.

The loss of my sister last December brought back all of those thoughts and feelings, and they were magnified intensely by my sobriety. I had no choice but to allow myself to feel every twinge of it. There was no hiding from my mind or my heart. If you know me well at all, you know that I am a chronic over-thinker and can never simply let things go without obsessively thinking on them for quite a while.

I’m blessed that I may take comfort in the fact that my legacy is now so different from that which I’d committed myself to leaving in my days of active addiction. My legacy now compared to then seems to be a mirror image standing upon its head. I decided that I wanted more from myself and from this life and that something had to change before my legacy was irreparably cemented.

What’s your legacy? How does that picture look when you reflect upon it? It’s not too late to change the colors or reshape the lines. If you are drawing a breath, it isn’t too late to want more. It’s not too late to become who you were born to be. 

Selfishness and Self-Centeredness WIll (Hopefully) Slip Away

One of the telltale signs of an addict, both active and in recovery is an amazing ability to put him or herself in the center of everything or to drum up controversies that don’t actually exist in reality for the rush of having the attention solely focused on them. This can be done in a variety of ways by the varied cast of characters: the Drama King or Queen trying to generate attention by lamenting their lot in life, the perpetual one-upper, the overeager criticizer, or the melodramatic eternal exaggerator.

An integral part of growing up is accepting responsibility for the things you do or fail to do. For the active addict (or the dry drunk) that concept is often the furthest thing from their minds. As childlike as we are in the midst of our acting out, we cannot possibly see how anything bad that happens in our lives is any fault of our own.  Being held accountable for our mistakes is not only necessary, but also a function of living life on life’s terms. We must seek to be held responsible for the foolish things we do or have done in order to combat the seeds of guilt that could germinate into a full-fledged relapse.

The desire to elevate one’s own reputation or perception within a group by pulling down that of another person is a telltale sign of self-centeredness. We must strive only to produce a positive reputation by our own thoughts, words and actions. This directly opposes the ages-old doctrine of pulling another down to raise ourselves. You have to be too big of a person to belittle someone else for your own gain; gain only by your own merit. If you do the right thing every time you have the chance, your own merit will be enough. What you do always speaks louder than what you say anyway.

The eternal exaggerator is the person more known for their fish tales than their actual positive impact. You can never fully trust this person and you cannot respect anyone based on trumped-up stories of watered down successes.  They feel the need to generate manic energy (both positive and negative) and it is off of this energy that they feed. As long as your attention is on them, no claim is too fantastic or far-fetched. Their reality is their krytponite. We must craft a life for ourselves that is too fantastic to either escape or lie about.

There are proper times and places for being in the spotlight, but it takes the appropriate amount of humility and grace to ensure that the spotlight isn't your constant aim. Work hard at living your life according to your values and beliefs and that will garner you attention enough; additionally, that attention will be the right kind for the right reason. If you have to constantly seek the spotlight you may want to consider what is missing from your life. It has created the void you are trying to fill and you must stop trying to fill it with something so hollow as attention. That’s a round peg that you’re trying to fit into a heart-shaped hole.