Recently I saw a movie based on true events. It's about a man married with two children and both children are dying from a disease. There is no cure for their disease and both children have a year to live. The turning point in the man's life is when he looks into the eyes of his daughter and sees her determination. She is a fighter. At that moment he makes a choice. He decides he will do what ever it takes to find a cure. He quits his job, finds a doctor who's researching the disease, moves his family to be close to the doctor, and raises boatloads of dough. He and the doctor partner and they do the unimaginable, they find a cure.
That consumed my thoughts for a few days. I asked myself, what decisions have I made lately that propelled me like a freight train barrelling down a track? What have I done to make the world a better place? How have I contributed to the human experience? If I die in my sleep tonight, how will I be remembered? Will I be remembered? Does it matter? No. It's my ego that gives two shits about that. But, how I impact the world, that matters.
There is the school of thought that tells us the little things we do each day is what really matters. Perhaps the sad woman I sat with at the doctor's office was uplifted by my silly story about sagging breasts versus fake implants. I made her laugh. Maybe her husband just died and she needed to laugh. I'll never know. What about the lady that I let go ahead of me in line at the grocery store. She looked depressed. If anyone needed a random act of kindness she did. She clutched her one item, a bottle of Advil pills, smiled and moved in front of me. God, I hope she wasn't going to go home and take them all at once. When I make a little choice to do something nice, I don't know the outcome. I do know where I'm coming from. I try to keep my ego out of my way and it's my goal to be a better person than I was the day before.
That's the best I have to offer today.
If I do happen to die in my sleep and one hundred years from now my great, great, great granddaughter looks me up on ancestry.com she's only going to find documents. She will find my birth certificate, my three marriage licenses, two divorce decrees, deeds to homes and my death certificate. She'll find out where I lived but she will not know how I lived, who I was or what mattered to me. She will not find me the person who lived unless she looks into her own good nature. She will find a web of physical, spiritual, and emotional data woven by those that came before her. She may be the one who cures another incurable disease. I can live with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment