The Legacy Project, 3: Quotes that Changed History - Quotes that Changed My Life

Photo by me - from the Book of Wisdom

Steve Leder’s book, For You When I am Gone, has been an essential reference for my ethical will project. As mentioned before, I’ve bought into the idea of leaving behind writings aimed at helping my adult children, my someday survivors, understand me a little bit better. If money talks, its material legacy says, “I want you to feel more secure. And don't blow it.” An ethical legacy says, “I want you to feel even more secure. Try not to blow it.”

Honestly, I’ve all but lost motivation for this kind of writing. As John Coffey tells the guard in The Green Mile, “I’m tired, boss.”

But Leder proposes a fun exercise that’s easy to execute: list the five quotes that best represent the totality of your life. That’s an easy assignment, given many quotes that have imprinted upon me through the years. My only problem is that I remember so many of them that always pop into my head at the right time. My mind’s eye still views the words in the context in which I first “met” them, right down to the page numbers of specific books.

A great quote committed to (or impressed upon) memory is like having a wise personal inner advisor. A bunch of them is like an advisory board overseeing the soul's work. Putting these words together to weave the tapestry of a particular lifetime is quite a challenge but worth it. Anyone can do this and develop a unique framework to better understand the subtle influences upon a life that’s been thoroughly lived.

So, here goes. Because I needed to narrow my selection considerably, I offer what first came to mind as I considered past decades.

1. “Because you are precious in my life, and honored, and I love you, I will give men for you and people for your life.” Isaiah 43:4. Note: depending on the specific biblical translation, this verse changes subtly in meaning according to what translators made of it. The words as shown here hung on a plaque on my wall in the 1970s. I first saw it in an Abbey gift catalog and had to own it despite the fact that I could barely afford it in those days. The words reside within me now, having seen me through many difficult times.

   Perhaps best of all, they were prescient – there always have been “people for me.” They also taught me how crucial it would be to try to be there for others in their lives. Now that I think of it, those words on the wall revealed something else - the most impactful teaching comes to us by example, not through exhortation. The main point is hammered into us by virtue of our own reflected experience in relation to what we are urged to remember as a “truth.”

2. “Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen.” From Marge Piercy’s wonderful poem, The Seven of Pentacles: The Influence Coming into Play. A friend gave it to me when I was divorced in the 1980s. It’s filled with inspiration and hope for anyone going through an “I’m such a f*ck-up” phase.

3. The unexpected is bound to happen; the anticipated may never come. Nisargadatta. This is not nihilistic. It’s realistic. We think we know how something will play out, but it's all a guess in the great game of life. Live intentionally and hopefully, but be ready for change. We know very little, and even a lot of that is debatable. The point, of course, is: live now. It’s all you have.

4. This, the embodied self, was never born and thus shall never die. Having never been, it will never cease to be. Birthless, eternal, primordial, primeval, it is not slain when the body is killed. From the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. Happened across it in 2005 and had the words tattooed in Sanskrit on my back. I don’t want my kids to forget what it means, though the letters are faded now. Kids were right - now it really looks like a bar code.

5. No doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes. From poet laureate Stanley Kunitz’s poem, The Layers. Yes, as so many sages and holy books would have it: It is already written! This is as close as I will ever come to preaching.

Well, that was easy and quite astonishingly conclusive. Many thanks to Rabbi Steve Leder, and a million thanks to those living or dead who’ve made their wisdom available to us all.