Today I walked in to town. I bought a few books at the local book shop. I sat in the shade outside of a coffee shop with a large coffee and read. The epigraphs to one of the books I bought (The Years by Annie Ernaux) read:
All we have is our history, and it
-Jose Ortega y Gasset
does not belong to us.
Yes. They’ll forget us. Such is our fate, there is no help for it. What seems to us so serious, significant, very important, will one day be forgotten or seem unimportant. And it’s curious that we can’t possibly tell what exactly will be considered great and important, and what will seem petty and ridiculous….
-Anton Chekhov
The first sentence of the book reads: “All the images will disappear.” Jesus… if that doesn’t put life into perspective, I’m not sure what does. All of this will be forgotten. The best of me, the worst of me – forgotten and inconsequential. My small addition to this line of thought was that the fights and the tender moments will also be forgotten. In which case, let’s spend more time on tenderness and less time on thinking we’re right – in every domain of life. Or something like that. Said in a slightly different way, if we can choose anything, let’s choose kindness. And of course, even when everything will be forgotten, the present moment and our memory is all we have… it looms large in our day-to-day existence. How others have made us feel, how we have made others feel. In the current moment, this (whatever this is) is of the greatest importance, and it too will be forgotten – the drama, the anger, the joy, the slings, the arrows, the healing, the hurt and the kindness, what we hold most dear – all of it will be buried and forgotten. Yet this is how we spend our days. This is how we fill our lifetimes.
If, for most of us, none of this will be remembered more than one or two generations removed, I can think of no better reason to give the utmost care and attention for who is with us today. Our legacy is now.