Have you ever wondered as to what your legacy will be after you’ve departed from your physical being?
Is it important to leave a legacy behind?
How far in time will one’s legacy live?
How is one’s legacy remembered and by whom?
These are deep and personal questions and I’m raising them here with the intent of stimulating my mind and hopefully yours to ponder further on this subject.
Unlike what historians or biographers do in capturing the legacies of famous, notorious, influential or criminal mortals, as individuals we don’t seem to have the same motivation to document the legacies of our departed family members or friends and the same argument holds true about others doing that for us.
Luckily a very few individuals will keep a diary throughout all or part of their lives and some will even write an autobiography, but these are even fewer and far between.
I suppose we all have memories of our departed family members and friends and, in some way, by reviewing those memories in our own mind and/or by discussing them with others we are somehow generating a verbal and mental image of their legacy. Alas, it is less common that we formulate a written version of our thoughts and we often find ourselves regretting that we did not keep good records of the sayings and doings of our departed ones.
By the same token, memories of our lives as seen by others will follow the same trajectory as the above described one.
I will deviate a little from the topic here to briefly address a physical phenomenon known as radioactive element decay time. All radioactive elements continue to lose their radioactivity over time and the metric that scientist most commonly use is known as decay constant (or half-life). Radiation emitted from the isotopes of the different radioactive elements will decay with different time constants and I won’t take a deeper dive into the physics of this matter any further, but please hold that decay notion!
Bearing all of the above in mind, it is fair to say that the chances of having one’s legacy survive within a fairly narrow circle of friends and family will likely follow a memory decay process analogous to what happens to radioactive matter with differing decay times depending on what continues to be remembered and what was documented during one’s lifetime and/or after one passes on!
Hani Badawi
February 27, 2018
Is it important to leave a legacy behind?
How far in time will one’s legacy live?
How is one’s legacy remembered and by whom?
These are deep and personal questions and I’m raising them here with the intent of stimulating my mind and hopefully yours to ponder further on this subject.
Unlike what historians or biographers do in capturing the legacies of famous, notorious, influential or criminal mortals, as individuals we don’t seem to have the same motivation to document the legacies of our departed family members or friends and the same argument holds true about others doing that for us.
Luckily a very few individuals will keep a diary throughout all or part of their lives and some will even write an autobiography, but these are even fewer and far between.
I suppose we all have memories of our departed family members and friends and, in some way, by reviewing those memories in our own mind and/or by discussing them with others we are somehow generating a verbal and mental image of their legacy. Alas, it is less common that we formulate a written version of our thoughts and we often find ourselves regretting that we did not keep good records of the sayings and doings of our departed ones.
By the same token, memories of our lives as seen by others will follow the same trajectory as the above described one.
I will deviate a little from the topic here to briefly address a physical phenomenon known as radioactive element decay time. All radioactive elements continue to lose their radioactivity over time and the metric that scientist most commonly use is known as decay constant (or half-life). Radiation emitted from the isotopes of the different radioactive elements will decay with different time constants and I won’t take a deeper dive into the physics of this matter any further, but please hold that decay notion!
Bearing all of the above in mind, it is fair to say that the chances of having one’s legacy survive within a fairly narrow circle of friends and family will likely follow a memory decay process analogous to what happens to radioactive matter with differing decay times depending on what continues to be remembered and what was documented during one’s lifetime and/or after one passes on!
Hani Badawi
February 27, 2018
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