Some people live their lives striving for something that will be remembered after they are gone. They search for their legacy. Something permanent that will endure for lifetimes beyond their own.
I’ve often thought that it would be nice to leave behind a building with my name on it or an invention that bore my patent. To think that someday, 200 years from now I will be remembered as a footnote in some engineering or computer text. That perhaps something I wrote is on page three thousand of a musty tome of last century’s writings and that a student might find that page of that book and be somehow moved by something I thought eighty years ago.
But in the end, I always come back to something different. My mark on the world will most likely not be an architectural marvel or a better mousetrap. Or a sonnet written in a fit of drunken inspiration. My legacy will be the small things. The way I improved just one person’s life. A smile I gave to a stranger that reassured them that the world wasn’t all self centered egotists. Helping a woman change a tire and not accepting payment, but instead saying "no problem, it was the right thing to do". All of those little things that I do in my life that make the world a better place to be. That will be my legacy. And it will not be remembered as such. No one will go to their death bed thinking "it all was better because of that nice man who smiled at me 25 years ago". There will be no holidays or memorials for me. No plaques or quiz questions commemorating my contribution to the human race.
But you know what? When my time is over and I look back, I will feel proud of how I lived and treated others.
And that is legacy enough for me.
