Legacy, “something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past,” says Merriam-Webster online: It is most commonly considered something you leave behind. It is how you are remembered. Will your words paint the stories of your purpose fulfilled, your passions pursued, your life lived fully in the moment with a presence of love?
Forget the tired old definition, and don’t LEAVE a Legacy. LIVE Your Legacy instead. Live your legacy with your words and writings as well as your actions. Writing to live your legacy: it’s a stunningly powerful way to leave something of value behind.
In reality how you are remembered is created one day and one moment at a time, through interactions, conversations, and yes, the slipstream of your written words. Those synergies make up the raw materials of your legacy. If you are writing, it’s your presence embracing the moment of the writing that creates the memorable and remarkable.
- Have you considered, rather than “leaving a legacy” behind you, instead to live each day as you wish to be remembered?
- Have you considered, as you write, to bring to the page the conscious presence of your deepest truest self in the moment?
- Have you thought it just isn’t possible or it’s too hard to express your gifts as a legacy?
You create what is memorable by how you passed through this world one moment at a time. Doing it with words makes your presence all the more powerful.
Your legacy is constructed of the bricks of consciousness, of the moments of your days stacked one atop and next to the other. It’s much like a dry stone wall–one rock fitted inevitably and perfectly next to the neighboring rock. No filler. No mortar. Just rock by rock. (Similarly Anne Lamott’s famous anecdote in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
gets at this too. Bird by bird, her brother got the report done.)
Whether it’s rock by rock or bird by bird or word by word or tweet by tweet, your legacy is created like that–day by day, word by word, moment by moment. You construct your legacy a day at a time, one moment and one interaction at a time, just as you live it. How you will be remembered? Will your legacy stand like some of Ireland’s dry rock fences, for centuries?
Follow the 30 Day Blogging Challenge on twitter at #blog30.
Tweet by tweet, moment to moment and word by word. It does feel good to have a book completed and leaving that bit of legacy for my grand kids. However the day by day moments of joy are the best legacy and are enjoyed by each of us most. It will also make the words left more meaningful.
Thanks Deb for visiting and leaving a comment. I find it an astonishing piece of news. Hope you are having a wonderful day.
Hi Bobbye,
I loved your post! What a wonderful way to look at it. Live your legacy.
Didn’t hear about the Library of Commerce archiving every tweet though. Interesting.
Deb
( @mywebgal #blog30 )
Bobbye, your post on living a legacy tweet by tweet is timely since the Library of Congress announced yesterday they are archiving every tweet ever made. When I heard that, I thought of all the *take backs* many will wish for when they think of the inane tweets they’ve made. Your thoughts here are a great reminder of the implications. Thank you!
Debra
Debra,
I’d heard that too, about the Library of Congress. There’s an underlying link [or should be] at the tweet by tweet to Library Journal’s reporting on this story.
Thanks for all your support!