Legends & Legacies

What is the legacy you want to leave behind?

Establishing a legacy has many important components, but there are two of those components that seem quite pertinent :

1. Ingenuity

2. Ambition

The settings of any given society or community is to encourage and uphold sameness as much as possible in order to maintain predictability of its members. Not only that, any kind of difference in conduct or personality trait is not only frowned upon but also punished in order to institute the fear of even thinking of oneself as being capable of achieving anything more than the average of the pack is capable of, even if those differences are positive and beneficial to the pack.

There’s a heavy price to pay for ingenuity. From subtle jabs to overt put downs, nicely framed acts of rejection, carefully crafted sabotage, and a properly disguised lunge for your jugular…the list is endless. It takes a lot of courage to work with one’s own ingenuity, and very few people can build that courage. It is therefore no wonder that legends are few in comparison to the world population.

Ambition is something that everyone has on paper and in speech, but few people have it in real life situations, and an incredibly fewer people understand that ambition can also be destructive if not properly managed. Note that in modern day societies, individuals tend to seek freedom that borders on irresponsibility towards their world and themselves.

So being ambitious is seen as a punishment. People don’t even want to offer enough work for the pay talk much of enough work to stimulate further self-improvement whether there’s a monetary incentive or not.

However, legendary people who have been able to leave a legacy behind have been the people who at some point were willing to give it their best efforts without any monetary gain, and didn’t consider that life was cheating on them at that point in time. Let’s be frank; not a lot of us want to do anything for free in the age of capitalism where it is all about survival.

Do I have a legacy I want to leave behind? Let’s see; I have dealt with a lot of the things that I mentioned above by simply just being myself. People tend to think that how I live my life is intended to either impress them or spite their own existence. I occasionally suffer compassion burn out trying to maintain a humane interaction with these kinds of people. I sometimes want to alter my course, douse my fire, blend in some more, silence my voice, kowtow unnecessarily, and just play along.

In continuing to fine tune my journey through life, I have always tried to establish what my baseline is at any given point in time, and sometimes it is not low enough to fit into situations that would take unnecessary attention away from me in some settings. I really don’t enjoy most of the attention I get because they mostly quickly degenerate into aspects I don’t like to concern myself with.

So I don’t know if I am trying to establish any legacy that would put overwhelming attention on me given how cutthroat the game tends to get sometimes.

Do you have a legacy that you want to establish? I strongly encourage you to do so. But here’s something I would like you to know; sometimes, you become completely legendary and unforgettable by simply just living your life genuinely and boldly.

Did you make it to this point? You’re badass! *Fist bump*