Legacy

Being a hypochondriac of outstanding proportions, I spend a lot of my time convinced that I’m about to be killed by a horrible and as yet not officially diagnosed disease, a disease that usually manifests as “a slight ache in the chest”, or “a funny feeling in the leg”, or something equally ominous-sounding. This quite often leads to me pondering my own mortality, in a fashion that ranges from the sobering (“My child will grow up without a father!”), to the practical (“I hope the life insurance is sufficient that Kath will lead a financially comfortable live from here on in”), to the absurd (“I hope Kath remembers that the green bin gets emptied every four weeks – miss that collection and the bin’ll be piled high and overflowing by next collection”). Sometimes, this pondering and musing transcends my potentially imminent death by an unrecognised illness, and I end up having an existential breakdown: what would I leave behind once I shuffle off this mortal coil that would be evidence for me having ever actually existed?

It’s unfortunate for me that the few friends I have are extremely talented, artistically. I have traditionally artistic friends who can draw or paint or shoot photos. I have musically talented friends, who can sing or play or write (or combinations thereof) far better than the auto-tuned-to-high-hell bullshit on the radio. Disappointingly, I have no artistic bent. My skills, limited as they are, are technological. I’m engineer, and more specifically a software engineer. I can write Hello, World! in a plethora of programming languages. I’m pretty good with a debugger. My object-oriented skills are there or thereabouts; my knowledge of the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns is sufficient, but improving. However, my skills are transient, and will not stand the test of time. A hundred years from now, a great song will still be a great song, and a well-executed painting will still be that, as art, as a corpus, accumulates over the years. Technology isn’t so lucky. As the years go by, and the advances occur, technology is replaced by the next generation, rather than be allowed to coexist. I can go to the National Gallery and take in the nearly 500 years old The Ambassadors by Holbein the Younger, and can still be wowed by the skill and talent it took to manifest that skull. However, send the average person to a computing museum and show them a ZX81, and one would suspect that the reaction would be akin to “Huh. Look at that crappy old tiny computer,” before said average person pulls out their iPhone to play a quick game of Temple Run 2 (or whatever the temporary game du jour is) on a device that’s likely double-digit orders of magnitude more powerful.

So if I lack any meaningful or tangible skill that’s going survive long after I’m worm food, what else is there? Well, one could say that a person’s experiences are their legacy – the tales they tell of their life, fat with excitement and adventure, are the things that they will be remembered for. My Dad is a prime example of this. Whilst whiling his days away being an exceptionally (exceptionally) talented engineer, he’ll occasionally regale us with stories of his youth that equal, or dare I say surpass (in my impressionable and hero-worshipping eyes), the feats he’s accomplished as an engineer. Every so often I’ll bug him to tell me the stories of when, in his early twenties, he was a test driver for the Ford Rally Team, for whom he’d take a week off work and go drive a prototype car across the dunes of the Sahara. Whilst barbecuing a couple of weekends ago, he was lamenting the lack of heat coming from the crappy old charcoal I’d supplied to cook our meat feast. I jokily threw in the idea that I’d go start my car and we could cook the sausages on the engine block. “Oh, we did that once with some eggs in the middle of the Sahara on one of the Ford test cars,” he casually, and non-egocentrically, replied. “We had to decide whether we were going to use the little remaining fresh water we had to drink, or to cool down the overheating engine after the eggs had finished.” Unbelievable. Same day, we were chatting over dinner about Paul McCartney singing at the Olympics closing ceremony, and how bad he was. This led to Dad proclaiming that “He was never any good back in the day, either,” and then telling us about the times his band shared a bill with The Beatles in Hamburg in the early sixties. Remarkable.

So where are my tales of adventure and derring do? Sadly, nowhere to be found. I spent my teens and early twenties drunk, what remained of my twenties sober and betrothed, and the start of my thirties attempting to be some kind of parental figure. I seem to be lacking an exciting back story that would serve as my legacy. Excepting, of course, all the usual drunken tales of a student, which are generally of no interest to anyone outside of the tale itself.

Maybe our legacy isn’t what we’ve done with our lives, more how we’ve set up the next chapter of life in general. Maybe our legacy is realised by the path that our children forge in the world, and that it is our sole objective to equip them with the best tools possible to achieve greatness in this task. If, perchance, my son goes on to cure cancer, or set foot on Mars, or solve nuclear fusion, then history may look fondly on me and proclaim my legacy of creating, nurturing and setting free a world-changing individual as one of note. Does that reduce us to merely vicarious hangers-on, whose only chance of being remembered is through the actions of our dependents? Probably not, but it’s another way to feel like a contribution has been made in the face of a dearth of notable, tangible personal achievements.

Or does it really matter at all? Is legacy only something that matters to the self-absorbed and self-obsessed? As long as one’s life is lived honestly, truthfully and with a heart of love, will that suffice to leave one’s mark on the world? I suspect so. Indeed, I think I’ve probably over-thought and over-typed what should have been a simple eight word thesis on legacy:

Forget legacy. Just be excellent to each other.

There’s not a situation imaginable for which Bill & Ted (or Rufus) don’t hold the inalienable truth.

(But that doesn’t mean I don’t still want my Dad to rock my world with awesome stories. There’s another tale he tells about the time he was rallying an overnight stage in the middle of nowhere in some snow-covered clime, when he encountered a queue of rival cars queued up at the bottom of an icily unpassable hill. Each team syphoned a small amount of petrol from their cars, providing sufficient fuel in total to cover the equivalent of two car tyre-width tracks up the hill. They all stood back, lit the fuel and, in a manner only slightly less spectacular than the end of Die Hard 2, watched the ice melt sufficiently that the cars could then ascend the hill on the freshly-exposed tarmac, and subsequently carry on rallying. Amazing. I can only assume Dad stood back and shouted “Yippee-ki-aye, motherfucker” whilst this was happening.

I really, really, hope all my Dad’s stories are true…)