What will be your legacy? Immediately the business of mind produces potential products, books, manuscripts, songs, poems. Your deathless legacies. On the other hand, the cascade of your emotions, will imagine the family linage, your children and their children. But what is the legacy of your heart?
Even if you have not had the inspiration, time or talent to produce a creative crop of legacies for the next generation how do we as a society measure each person. How do we individually judge others and more to the point how do we judge ourselves? By what you produce? How you appear? How wealthy you are? Your shoes? Your car? Your taste?
What happens inside your head? What happens when your mind has free reign?
“Oh God how is it that every time it rains I lose my keys.?” Rummaging in the big bag. ”I hate these key moments.” Sighing…
“I feel so frumpy in this..” After seeing an elegant woman.
“That woman is toxic..” While going through a divorce, emotions drive you towards vengeful thoughts and self loathing.
“She’s younger and prettier than me.” Low self esteem, uncompensated.
“What an ugly bastard.” Low self esteem boosted by arrogantly putting down others.
I’m sure you all have little inner voices and habitual, usually first family fuelled, scenarios that ride negative shot gun in your mind and its ego structure, that is, in a way your personality, or your interface with the world. The ego protects itself, it protects its expression because of its familiar (safe) habit of inner negativity or self aggrandisement.
This protection of your ego is based on the swing of low self esteem against arrogant behaviour. You miss the mark of self balance each time, swinging from high to low. But somewhere in there is a character poised between two extremes, a character that does not judge, that questions itself and attempts to act and respond in a balanced manner. Even the most extreme personality has this within them. If you go fast you will oscillate so quickly over the balance point you will miss it each time.
Well you may become peaceful eventually. As you slow your breath and your thoughts, your ego feels like it’s dying. As you move gradually through controlled and conscious breathing to fewer and fewer thoughts and measured responses, your mind/ego may attempt to attract your attention, it may pull out all the bells and hooters to prevent you stopping and try to draw your attention away from stillness. In fact that is exactly what happens, and it’s extremely distracting and addictive to ride the waves of your mind instead of experiencing the quiet but profound truth of who you are in balance.
Reactions and self righteous behaviours counter balance your low self esteem. Who you are is worth exploring, Just sayin….
So back to the question. What is your legacy? When you are gone what will be your lasting effect? My father died 10 years ago and I don’t think of him often. He was a business big wig and had no friends and did not ever gain the affection or respect of his children. He gained their fear and attempted resigned compliance. His legacy may carry itself into an inner rigidity in my personality unless I find a way to have true love for his gifts to me. His intelligence and a talent for drawing. On good days I am open and gracious and bad days I’m just as irritated and isolated as my dad. And don’t get me started on my emotionally tattered mother.
Do you love, rather than mollycoddle your children?
Do you treat yourself as important? Do you value your own opinions and thoughts enough to fight for them?
Do you respect others opinion, creeds?
Do you support and challenge yourself in a balanced manner?
Can you stand poised between what seems real and what actually is?
Can you tell the truth when asked and not before that?
I’m full of questions today and as a teacher of mind said, ” Your life is only as good as the quality of the questions you ask.?”
The only true legacy is love. When I was a child my main aim was to walk on sand without leaving a footprint, I could do that but not because I was light footed but because I walked where the sand and sea met and my footprint was washed away before I took another. I was able to walk on the earth, unmarked, only at a point between solid and liquid. Your mind is like that, what you think of as real and solid can only really be understood if you embrace a reality greater than your individual existence, this gives you the perspective to be poised on understanding knowing that you really don’t. Open to real earthly possibilities while acknowledging the ocean of imagined potentials.
Your legacy depends on your ability to balance what you can do with who you could be knowing that the vastness of life encompasses all its expressions in both good and bad.