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.