The farther I get in life's journey, the more I think about the impermanence of things. I look out my front door and think of people who have walked through it over the years, my parents and friends who have died, children who have grown, parents of those children whom we haven't seen in years. When my father passed away more than a decade ago, it finally hit me that death brings dissolution - as Shakespeare put it, our too, too solid flesh does indeed melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew. Everything we know and have known will someday disappear and be no more, including ourselves.
Of necessity, I suppose, we tend to brush this realization aside, choosing instead to go on with our lives as if we will live forever, as if nothing really will change, focused on making our lives and the lives of our loved ones as secure as we can. And there's nothing wrong with that. To quote a man at least as wise as Shakespeare, we choose to "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die."
But when we pause to remember our own finitude, we are confronted by these questions: What matters, after all? What lasts after we are gone? What will be my legacy? What difference can my life make to eternity?
The film "The Monuments Men" touches on some of these questions. The experts in art and other disciplines who are dispatched to rescue stolen art treasures from the retreating Nazis do so because the art represents the history of civilization, the identity of peoples. They are asked whether saving the works of masters like Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Renoir is worth the loss of human life that will inevitably befall their mission, and they answer that it is. There are things that matter more than an individual's survival, things bigger than ourselves.
In times of national crisis, we tend to pull together and sacrifice for the greater good. That is what the greatest generation did during World War II, and it is what another generation did after 9/11. One such person was a former associate of mine who left the practice of law after 9/11 to join the Coast Guard, out of a sense of duty to his country. I learned last week of his recent, untimely death (by natural causes), and it saddens me to know that we have lost such a noble spirit from our midst. But I have to believe that his service, like the service of so many others, made our country safer, and in that significant way will have a lasting impact.
At other times, though, it is easy to lose our way, dwelling far more on our individual concerns than on the greater good. One downside to our society's rugged individualism is that we lose sight of our communal selves, of the part we play in the collective drama of humanity. I sometimes obsess about my own mortality because I forget that I am just a small cell in a vast, more important organism, and that when I am gone the organism will continue and, hopefully, progress.
And so the question I confront now is: How can I contribute to that progress? Some people contribute in large ways - Presidents, scientists, inventors, poets, astronauts, soldiers and the many other heroes of our culture. Others contribute in small but equally important ways - by raising good children, through charitable work, or simply by being kind to their neighbors. Their random and not-so-random acts of kindness help to perpetuate the kind of world they want to live in, and the kind of world they want to leave to their children and their children's children. It is a way of keeping the spirit of humanity alive across the ages.
The best people I know are people of faith, whether faith in God, faith in humanity, faith in commonly revered principles like justice and equality, or faith in the power of love. In all cases, they recognize that there are eternal values that transcend their own lives, and they dedicate their lives to the service of those values. Their legacy will be a world that is better off because they lived. And therein lies their immortality.
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