The sands of the hourglass are running low. The bottom quickly filling, heavy as an anchor. This often changes how you view the lens, and what lens you use entirely. As I look back at the years that have elapsed, at the people who have come and gone, the places, the homes, the events, my heart aches a little. It’s part of the journey, gaining and losing. In your early years the gaining is followed by a period of losing those you grew up with who watched over you. In your later years more the losing than the gaining as more passes out of your life than comes into it. Partly because you are more selective about what you let in, partly because life events are fewer and farther between. The kind of things that bring new into your circle. The only thing harder than watching your own sands running low is watching the thinning of the sand of those you hold dear. Knowing theirs is so much thinner than yours that you will inevitably lose them before your own run out. There is a sadness in endings like that. Especially if they are struggling with it and you can do nothing to help.
I look back over my own years and toward my inevitable running out of the sands and wonder if I did okay. What legacy am I leaving? Did I do the important things? All parts of the journey, of the process of the journey. We often think of legacy as money or monuments, but it’s deeper than that. Strong legacies anyway. There is a sense of heritage, or being part of a strong ancestry as you pass from being a living presence to a memory of the family line. We are, most of us, ancestors to the generations that come after. What effect we have on them in the positive or negative, is up to us to decide. I would rather be a null effect than a negative one. But I think for the most part we all want to leave some positive behind. Honor and integrity at least. Some kind of guidance for those who come after to strive to achieve.
Music or art or writing: creativity is certainly an important legacy, even if it’s only privately or in the genes. Those are lifelong attributes that serve purpose and enrich existence. Wisdom? Maybe, if it’s teachable anyway. But how often is that really teachable? It’s remembered and usually the lesson is learned in other ways . Then we remember that we were told and we’re like, ah, yes, that’s right, I just didn’t listen. And then we laugh at ourselves, or wipe away the tears, depending on how harsh the lesson was. So in the end it becomes part of the legacy, even if not directly received.
These are all artifacts of our lives, the things we leave behind. For our descendants, or in some cases for generations of younger people. In some cases I suppose our legacy can reach beyond human beings, can be something to benefit nature or wildlife or the environment as a whole. As in the case of the inventor of some miraculous way to recycle all plastic waste or at the least break it down.
The average person will only leave grains of sand that - at best - will reach a few generations forward. In rare cases it will be a family legacy. As for me, I will leave behind images of a quickly shifting planet that will not exist by the time two generations have passed. A love for creativity and - I hope - a sense of exploration and responsibility to live life to its fullest before the sands run out and there is no time left in which to live.
