On Our Legacy

The only certainty upon our birth is our demise. How we will die, when and where are unbeknownst to us. Isaac Asimov if he was alive now might have contemplated writing — ”Last Breath” a sequel to his famous — ”Nightfall”. However depressing it may sound, the likelihood of dying increases every day we live on this planet. So it’s not uncommon to ponder about the mark we want to leave behind when we depart from our lives. This thought somehow crept into the mind of my good friend, M who posed it to the rest of us in our chat group recently. M asked us — ”What do you want your legacy to be?”

Now, answering this question may not be as trivial as it seems. Is our legacy like a personal Ad slogan that describes us? I was reminded of the Jensen & Nicholson ad -”Whenever you see color, think of us?” Or, Amul’s -”Utterly, Butterly, Delicious.” What do you think your slogan would be? Mine would probably be Bubli 😂, grumpy 😠, serious 🧐 dude depends on whom you ask. Edison, Father of all inventors, Steve Jobs the dude who brought the world to our hands , Thoreau, the founder of civil disobedience, etc. Is our legacy like our brand that we leave behind? Remember watching this Green Ply Ad that talks about plywood that last generations. So could our legacy be what we leave behind for generations?Do you think these gentlemen and others with great accomplishments lived their life so they could leave behind their accomplishments as their legacy. Is legacy like our personal mission statement that we use to drive our lives? Let’s explore these together.

So what should our life’s mission be? When we are born we are truly free to adopt whatever mission we choose. But we live carefree for we don’t know better. Our mission is to conquer the world. As we age and acquire knowledge and imbibe morals and ethics from those around us we continuously evolve. By the time we reach adulthood we have matured into our full selves with our own set of values that is representative of our character. We continue to evolve through our lives sometimes influenced by life’s happenings but mostly our morals and ethics don’t change. But each of us picks a vocation and build a life that first fulfills our basic needs and those of our kith and kin. At some point along when our obligations have been fulfilled we start to reflect on our lives and its purpose.

For the sake of argument let’s assume that we are not one of those realized souls that found their purpose at a young age. So how do we answer M’s question? Is our legacy the homes we built at Habitat for Humanity, the lunches and dinners we served at our local soup kitchen, the charitable acts we did by supporting charities with our donation(s), the hours we spent helping our kith and kin? Or, is it the wealth we accumulated, the status or reputation we built, the awards we won, the accolades we accumulated. Or, is it the tangible achievements we had — the patents in our name, the company we founded and took public, the number of people we employed, the papers we wrote, the speeches we gave, the surgeries we did and the lives we saved. We can quickly compile a really long list.

Which of these could represent our legacy? Is excelling in our vocation our legacy or the result of our excelling our legacy. A doctors job is to save lives. Let’s say for argument sake that all doctors save lives, so does it imply all these doctors have similar legacies. Then all we need to do is become a doctor and then our legacy is pre-ordained. So clearly in this illustration the outcome even if a good one is not what we would call our legacy. Now let’s say we have two doctor’s- one who cares for their patient and another who does his job to earn a paycheck. The former cares for his patient but the latter is a good doctor but indifferent. Would we consider the goodness the first doctor as his legacy. Seems reasonable, wouldn’t you agree. Seems like it’s not our qualification but who we are that appears to be our legacy.

Now do you think we can will ourselves to be a good person? Or, do we need to be innately good. We all have blemishes in our characters and through out our life have attempted to change. Despite our myriad efforts most of us still are unable to. We know ourselves and adjust our behaviors so our true self doesn’t come out and continue to tarnish our reputation. But our base self is probably mostly the same. There maybe outliers but by and large our values acquired at an early age stick with us through out our lives. So it appears we can change incrementally but not radically. That would imply that our goodness quotient can improve but since changing our personality is hard a radical change in most cases is hard, perhaps not impossible.

Although it sounds corny, our legacy is who we are not who we want to be. So maybe M’s question is rhetorical. Our wants for our legacy maybe our desires but distorts reality. Being who we are maybe our legacy. The uniqueness that we each bring trumps everything else. Rather than looking out and seeing what others have done and say we want to be like them. We should look within and introspect. Looking for the goodness in our selves and then giving feet to it, is what we should all do. When we make mistakes which we all will do, we go back to our values and start afresh. To know our legacy we should know ourselves. So the million dollar question is -”Do we know who we are?”

“Vedanta asserts that the goal of life is to realize and to manifest our own divinity. This divinity is our real nature, and the realization of it is our birthright. We are moving towards this goal as we grow with knowledge and life experiences. It is inevitable that we will eventually, either in this or in future lives, discover that the greatest truth of our existence is our own divine nature.” Those are not my words but those of learned souls from years ago.