18 What Is My Legacy?
Years after her mother had passed, Michelle remained in awe of the legacy her mother had left. Michelle could see everywhere the evidence of her mother’s hope and faith, not just on Michelle herself but also on her mom’s other three children, including Michelle’s half-siblings born after her mother had remarried. Michelle could also see her mom’s impact on Michelle’s own children, her mom’s grandchildren. Michelle also saw how her mother had blessed the school where her mom had taught for many years and the church where her mom had married, attended, and served. Friends still told Michelle how much they missed her mom, years after she passed. And that, more than anything, told Michelle that her mom had left a rich legacy.
Definition
A legacy is the impression or impact, positive or negative, that one leaves after one is gone. A legacy is a bright gleam or, on the equation’s other side, a tarnish years or decades after one passes. A legacy is an impact felt across the years and even across the generations. A legacy is a resonance that echoes long after one is gone. A legacy isn’t purely a sentiment left in the hearts of family members, friends, and acquaintances, although positive emotions of the sentimental sort or, on the other side, insults and offenses can carry weight well beyond the grave. Yet a legacy is more than memories, good or bad. A legacy is leaving positive or negative patterns that others unconsciously follow for generations. A legacy sets loose angels to bless or demons to curse, season after season, decade after decade, down through the ages. A legacy is a course or trajectory of one’s life that others should imitate or avoid and eschew. A legacy can be a powerfully good or powerfully haunting thing.
Pursuit
On your last leg of your transcendent journey, you may find solace in considering your legacy. You may also be able to confirm and extend your legacy. As the following discussion shows, the care you show in executing your estate plan can leave an influential material legacy. The care you show in expressing your confidence and faith to your family members and friends can leave an equally or even more influential immaterial legacy. The poise, purpose, and grace you show in your passage to the great beyond can be the crowning glory to your lifelong legacy, referring to the way in which you lived not only for yourself but also for your loved ones and community. If you struggle over what your life has meant, find its meaning in the resonance your life reflects with the world’s best patterns that your life has now celebrated and reinforced. It’s not a bad thing to live for one’s legacy, transmitting one’s faith, purpose, and commitments as far and wide as your gifts allow.
Difference
Who, really, shows concern for their legacy? More of us would, if we thought about it. If you don’t think that legacies make a difference, then you haven’t been studying history. Nor have you been looking very closely at your own family line. Generational blessings and curses are a real thing, whether you look at statistics or idiographic accounts. Families aren’t incidental. They’re instead society’s bedrock. Their immensely important role is that families most effectively raise and socialize the young. Overall, children raised in families have faster and better mental, physical, and social development than children raised institutionally. They also generally have better behavior and attachment. As adults, we affect the people closest to us. We pour ourselves into our family members and, if we’re strong, faithful, and vital enough, our neighbors and communities. Norms, values, traditions, customs, attitudes, expectations, language, behaviors, and even specific skills get passed down across generations. Legacies make huge differences.
Wealth
The first thing of which many people think when hearing the word legacy is the wealth that some families pass down through the generations. When a Rockefeller or Morgan amasses a vast fortune, generations of Rockefellers and Morgans can benefit. The oil baron John D. Rockefeller made his fortune well over a century ago, and although he gave much of that wealth away, his descendants, numbering more than a couple hundred, still control and benefit from the fortune he accumulated. You don’t have to be a Rockefeller in vision, drive, determination, and simply good fortune to leave a legacy. Plenty of hardworking Americans earning not much more than, and in some cases no more than, an average living manage to leave wealth to their next generation. And if the next generation lives the same way, they may leave substantially more wealth to the next generation, given their head start. Who better to control inter-generational wealth than the millions of individuals who receive it as a treasured gift, along with the love and values to use it wisely and democratically? Most of us would trust our children or other designated heirs with our wealth far more than we would trust the government.
Identity
The wealth, though, isn’t always in the coin but sometimes rather in the affinities. Many think of a legacy as involving material wealth, but a legacy’s immaterial aspects can be more valuable. The identity that a legacy conveys can be its greatest asset. We enter the world taking on the name, social status, reputation, and web of connections of our parents and grandparents. Later, employers, mentors, and advisors help us forge our own reputation, standing, and network, if we wish or need to strike out from our family’s reputation, connections, and ways. And that’s the point: we make our way through the world not alone but on a web of connections woven in small or large parts by others. Our identity isn’t our own but instead belongs to those who influence us, transmitted through a set of values, experiences, behaviors, and expectations. And that’s what a legacy leaves. A legacy places those who receive it in a nest of nurturing relationships borne of identity with the departed one who formed it. The immaterial benefits of a legacy are communal, nested in a rich web of relationships forming a secure identity.
Perspective
The immaterial benefits of a legacy are also individual, in the perspective that the legatee carries through the world as the legator’s gift. The attribute that sets humanity apart from the animal kingdom is our perspective on the world, our ability to carry a manipulable consciousness of the world and ourselves within it. We are both self-conscious and conscious of our consciousness within a world whose creator is himself conscious. We receive our consciousness and conscience from those who raise and influence us. We receive our consciousness, referring to our language and ability to use that language internally to shape our view of the world, as a legacy. Of course, consciousness is a very broad legacy with many legators, well beyond just our parents. But those closest to us who influence us most also most influence the nature of our consciousness. You can leave to your children your perspective on the world, whether cranky and despairing on the one hand or profound and grateful on the other hand, as your legacy.
Faith
We are not only both self-conscious and conscious of our consciousness within the world but also aware that the world’s creator is himself conscious and still participating in the world. We are, in other words, not just human but divine, taking divine to mean being aware of the thinking, knowing, living presence beyond the world who made the world and who continues to participate in it toward its purpose. The greatest legacy one can leave is that insight into the realm beyond the world. For the realm beyond the world not only organizes, structures, and influences the world but also gives the world its purpose. No life can for very long or very effectively persevere without a sense of its purpose. And the broader, deeper, and richer that sense of purpose is, the broader, deeper, and richer will be one’s life and one’s own legacy. The most spectacular imaginable eternity is within our reach. That realm is so extraordinarily rich and mysterious that we must inherit our spare knowledge of it from the way in which it has revealed itself across the ages. Leave that legacy of faith to the ones about whom you care most, and you will have left them the greatest possible legacy.
Motivator
The above discussion considers a legacy’s wealth, identity, and perspective dimensions. Yet beyond the material and immaterial things that a legacy leaves to others, a legacy is also a great motivator for the one who intends and designs it, and strives to leave it. Indeed, if motivation was most of what a legacy meant, a legacy would still be well worth it. Do you want a good reason to live? Live for your legacy. Living in a way that most positively impacts the greatest number beyond and after your own earthly life is to live for the highest ideal, indeed for heaven. You may have had a limited reach in life, for whatever reason. You may realize that your impact is likely to only be on one person, perhaps your surviving spouse or maybe an adult child who survives you. No matter. Live for that one person’s greatest benefit long after you’ve left earth’s face, and you’ll have lived with the eternal heart. And anyone who has met and embraced the eternal heart knows that one can live for no greater purpose because the eternal heart is the purpose of creation.
Criticism
Some take a dim view of legacies, whether material or immaterial. You hear much criticism these days of people born with privilege, having been born with a silver spoon in their mouth, or having been born on third base with only a short stroll to home. And naturally, some individuals have more advantages at birth than others. Yet that is precisely the point about legacy. Sure, we could all work our hardest to eliminate everyone else’s birth advantages, stripping the world of advantage so that everyone starts from the same desperate place. But is that the world you really want? In that world, you’d have no reason to live for anyone but yourself because the world would strip you, too, of the legacy that you’d hope to leave for those closest to you, too. The better world is the one we have, in which each of us has the opportunity to leave a legacy for those closest to us, those whom we trust the most with whatever we can create in the world that outlasts us.
Outlasting
And that’s the profound beauty and utter goodness of the world in which we live. We not only get to appreciate the world’s goodness ourselves, which can be hard to see at times through pain, loss, and toil but is still present. We also get to amplify that goodness for those around us to enjoy after we’re gone. The ability to influence the world in positive ways, resonating with the world’s spectacular goodness, beyond the end of our own earthly lives, is the most preposterous aspect of the world’s human dimension. The world presents itself to us as if we, too, were eternal beings, living already with one foot in the greater realm that constitutes and guides this earthly realm, lending the material world its meaning, purpose, pattern, and order. We can send ahead into a future here on earth, occupied by others, part of our own faith and goodness, bestowed on us from the higher realm. The best part of us can outlast us here on earth. Or the worst part. You choose.
Reflection
How would you define a legacy? What evidence do you see that legacies make a difference? What legacy did someone else leave you, on which you continue to draw? Which would you rather have received, a material legacy or an immaterial one? What would be the most powerfully positive thing someone else could have left you? Is that something you could leave someone else? What aspects of your identity, reflected in your relationships and reputation, do you owe to others? How did those closest to you, now departed, shape your attitude and perspective toward the world? Can you articulate the world’s purpose and your connection with that purpose? Does your legacy motivate you, shaping your attitudes, choices, and behaviors for the better? Can you see the connection between leaving a legacy that outlasts you and your own eternal destiny?
Key Points
A legacy is an influence or impact that outlasts you.
Your legacy makes a difference in the lives of others for whom you care.
A legacy can include both material wealth and immaterial benefits.
Your legacy can include the identity and reputation you leave others.
Your legacy can include the outlook on life you leave others.
Your greatest legacy may be the faith you show in your purpose in life.
Your legacy can motivate you to be more purposeful and positive.
Your legacy outlasting you is a profound feature of your own divinity.