A Legacy Isn't What You Think It Is

The idea of leaving a legacy in life came up on Facebook earlier –– everything it does and doesn't mean (and to whom). I posted a meme I found. Then a couple of friends direct-messaged me to share some of their own thoughts on the subject.

And as sometimes happens with me, the word kept bouncing around in my head throughout the day, long after those conversations were over.

Legacy. 

What does it actually mean to people to have one, and should it mean those things? Why is it so crucial to so many people? And perhaps most importantly, why hadn't it ever been particularly important to me?

When we talk about legacy, most people picture something grand and (hopefully) lasting. They picture having children who grow up to accomplish something great, passing on wealth or a family business, or being remembered by the rest of society in a speech or a headstone. Maybe they even see themselves creating something artistic or inventing something groundbreaking that gets them recognized. 

But the truth is, most of us won’t be remembered that way. 

I've always been a realist. I've also never personally wanted children or cared much about winning other people's approval. It's always been a given to me that I'd probably have my time on earth and eventually recede into obscurity when the time came. 

A lot of us eventually get there. And that's the point where you realize legacy isn't necessarily what we're taught to think it is at all.

The Myth of Legacy

Let’s be real for a second. Most families don’t remember their ancestors or lineage beyond their grandparents. Maybe a great-grandparent, if they were lucky enough to ever meet one. But names, faces, and details vanish fast. Even if your name makes it onto a family tree or you wind up with a grave people can visit, that’s not the same as being remembered as a person.

The pressure to leave some lasting mark on the world has become one more thing we’re expected to respond to, especially in a culture obsessed with hustle, productivity, and legacy-building.

But when you pull back and look at things honestly, you realize:

• Very few people are remembered beyond a generation or two.
• Legacy is often conflated with fame, lineage, or wealth.
• Even famous or otherwise noteworthy people are often misunderstood or reduced to symbols.

So what are we really trying to leave behind? Who are we trying to prove something to, and why?

A Very Green Visitor Crashed Our Card Game Last Night

So, as I've mentioned, Seth and I have been eating most of our dinners outside since just before Midsommar or so, as we were unexpectedly blessed with wonderful moderate weather this summer. Then after we eat, we like to sit and play cards for a while before going back inside to finish our workdays. Of course, it's been getting darker earlier and earlier, but the temperatures are still really moderate -- not even jacket weather yet -- so we've just been turning on the outside light over our table and carrying on as usual. (For now, anyway. Now that it's past the equinox, I'm sure it will be getting colder soon enough.)

Last night, we had this little visitor. At first, it tried to land on the back of my neck, and I freaked out because I didn't know what it was. It just felt big, heavy, flappy, and cold, so I figured it was a moth or something. Then it came back and landed on the wall next to us where we could see it better. We tried to shoo him away into the bushes (where I assume he belongs), but he kept coming back and insisting on perching nearby somewhere for the remainder of our card game. 

I could see it was a grasshopper of some kind, but I wanted to know what kind and Google suggests it's probably a katydid, especially considering it was nighttime. And since I'm also kind of a woo-woo witchy type, you know I wanted to know the spirit animal meaning. It's apparently growth, transformation, forward progress, and spiritual awareness. Grasshoppers of any kind -- especially any that are as brilliantly green as this one was -- are also supposed to be lucky and suggestive of prosperity. (Thanks, I'll take it. Especially the prosperity part.) 

June Musings in Triplicate

The Treachery of Images - Rene Magritte (1928-29)

As always, time continues to fly without my apparently noticing, but for once it's not necessarily a bad thing. In just a little over a week, I'll have reached my six-month milestone as far as my decision to improve my health goes. Six months of mindful eating with intermittent fasting. Six months of working out every single weekday without fail. I've lost close to 40 pounds since New Year's Day, so I'm about where I hoped I'd be with my weight loss journey by halfway through the year. I've been building muscle, strength, and stamina. A couple of weeks ago, I also started wearing a latex waist trainer when I work out to help support my abs and encourage my waist to tighten up a little bit -- another little something that's been helping me make steady progress toward my goals.

At this rate, I expect to be very happy with where I'm at by the end of the year. Two years from now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I'm actually able to look in the mirror without seeing a single thing I don't like about my body composition. That will be absolutely amazing, as I haven't been able to say I like my body in many years. I've never been able to say I'm 100% happy with it, so that's something I'm looking forward to for sure, especially since I'm in my 40's now. I'll take my ego boosts where I can get them.

This is hardly just a vanity thing for me though. Everything that's been going on with my mother over the past year has really changed my attitude toward self-care and fitness. She's taken terrible care of herself pretty much the entire time I've been alive. She's always been as lazy and sedentary as her responsibilities would allow her to be. She's very overweight and has a terrible relationship with food. For a long time, she had just as terrible a relationship with alcohol as well. I honestly always just thought of that as her business until she ran her health into the ground to the point where she couldn't really take care of herself anymore.

On Election Day

People have never quite understood why I am the way I am. Particularly in regards to why I don't trust the system, wish to be part of society to a greater extent than I absolutely have to, or believe in the inherent goodness of humanity. Something tells me they're starting to understand now.

The thing is I've understood for a while that we live in a garbage society filled with garbage humans that are the very picture of arrogance, entitlement, vanity, hypocrisy, and prejudice. Our society is infected with an illness you can smell even on people that don't see themselves as being anything of the sort and this has been the case for as long as I've been alive. That society threw me away a long time ago in a way I've been painfully aware of for as long as I can remember.

Nothing has really changed as far as the type of world we live in. It's always been like this. You just see it now. You are realizing how big, and bad, and putrid the sickness really is, perhaps for the first time. This election dragged it right out into the open where everyone had no choice but to look at it, smell it, and try not to vomit at the stench. What I am talking about isn't even about politics, really. It is, however, something that has been exposed by politics as such things often are.

On Diversity in the Media

Here's the thing. I actually don't like it when television shows and movies are "diverse", but it feels forced. I don't like it when black/gay/female/etc characters are just thrown into the mix as tokens just for the sake of being able to say "fuck yeah diversity". I very definitely feel like there's a wrong way to approach diversity and I see things being done the wrong way a lot.

But I do not understand people that actually go out of their way to complain about diversity as a concept when it comes to the media they consume. I also can't help but notice that the complainers are always people that have no earthly idea what it's like to grow up almost never seeing people that looked or acted like them when they went to the movies or turned on their television.

I know what that's like and it's really not fun. It really does give you the impression that you're an undesirable of one type or another. Or that there's something wrong with you. Or that society would really like it if you just disappeared or tried your best to hide/deny/erase anything about yourself that makes you different. The characters people rooted for in movies and on television were very, very rarely anything like me. When they were there at all, people like me were almost always the sidekicks, or the comic relief, or -- God forbid -- the villain.

On Faces

The interesting thing about faces is that they always tell you the truth of a given person, especially as that person ages. When a person smiles or laughs a lot, you can see it in the way their face has wrinkled, settled, or changed over the years. The same thing happens when a person does nothing but pout, and frown, and complain. The effect is most obvious in older people, but you can see it in young people as well.

I've known a lot of people that claim to be super positive, happy beings but aren't really that way in practice. If you didn't know any better from actually observing the realities of the person's life, you could look at the permanent pout burned into their face and see the truth. Same thing goes for people that may appear sour and depressive on the surface, but have faces that give away the fact that they actually laugh and smile a lot.

I'm realizing that I might be the second sort. Outwardly, I complain and bitch a lot. I would even say I see and describe myself as a brooding, pensive person for the most part. But when I step back and really admit how much I laugh and how often I smile -- how often I ultimately wind up seeing the best in something -- I realize that isn't actually accurate. And my face gives me away. I have the face of a happy, pleasant, inquisitive person even if I don't always feel like one.