A few weeks after this post goes live and before the year is out I’ll be turning fifty.

Five-oh.

Naturally, as I was putting together the list of topics to write about in this writing project, the notion of my inevitable post-existence emerged as a real strong contender… because we might not dwell on it, but we do occasionally remember that someday all that will be left of any of us is memory and artifacts of our time here. If even that much.

Creative folks don’t necessarily make shit because they are trying to leave a legacy, but a legacy of our efforts is certainly a side product of living and breathing and dreaming big ideas that translate into written words or composed music or clever little bits of art hanging in someone’s living room.

Heck, as I walked into my home office I passed a framed cross-stitch sampler we have hanging on the wall that was made by a long-passed ancestor of my spouse. I doubt she sat down to make that, spent hours sewing every single stitch, and pondered whether it would be the one thing that her great-granddaughter someday had left to remember she had ever existed. It’s a morbid thought, but these little things, moments captured in creativity and craftsmanship might turn into exactly that much for most of us—if we’re even that lucky.

Will some painting I’ve already painted be all that is left of everything I ever aspired to sketch?

Are there collections of words and photos yet to be pounded into keys or snapped through lenses that will ultimately and solely remain to mark my interest in those hobbies?

What will the legacy of any of our creative lives become after we die?

Like I said, I don’t particularly dwell on it but under the category of Death & Taxes I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

We all make stuff. 

Maybe you’re not an artist or a writer or a musician, as I write about those things here, but you might prepare food, manage money, build roads, fight for justice, heal the sick—or any of countless other jobs—and each of those things the pursuit against the entropy of the universe. It is making order out of the slide into chaos.

And if you are doing any of this making, eventually, probably, likely someone will ask you why you have made the things you have made.

Why? Why did you spend your time on this planet, in this life, doing this thing and making what you made? Why this?

It would be easy to mistake this for a requisite justification of our lives, rather than for what I think it is: the realization by all of us on the side asking the question: that what makes us humans is looking into the heart of someone else’s passions and seeking to understand.

So. If someone asks you don’t flinch and feel interrogated. Explain yourself. Share your soul. Spread your love of that thing you do.

Kids are, often by a kind of cynical definition, a kind of legacy that demands a legacy.

We parent for a million different reasons, but not the least among those reasons is the biological imperative to pass along a bit of ourselves.  That’s not selfishness or ego any more than it is the raw organic chemistry of life.

And the physical passing of genes is the (relatively) easy part: simply having a kid, as difficult as that is for many, is step one in a lifelong process of a notion wrapped up in a word that often fails to do the effort justice: parenting.

I reflect on these things and notice more and more each day that the Kid, for all her uniqueness, has embraced a kind of creative legacy from me: she dabbles in art, she writes about film, she plays with music, and she looks at the world through the same quirky lens that I tend to find distorts my perceptions of everything I see and do.

This is modelling, sure. This is biased opportunities, of course. This is parenting, always.  But eighteen years of effort has also led to a kind of creative legacy of self that I have, probably as a side effect of just being open and transparent, have instilled on the next generation.

What would you make?

Would you aim for perfection of quality by making something well that you knew you could make well? Or would you push yourself, not caring about potential imperfection, and want it to express your individuality in it’s flaws by showing people that you were striving to be better? It will say something about you whatever you choose, you know.

Would you make something of value to others? Or would you make something of value to yourself? Would you stop caring about the marketability of that thing, or if it would get lots of clicks or if it had potential to bring in high sales? No really, I’m asking? I think some people would want their last craft to have a literal payoff even if they weren’t there to enjoy it, while others might feel that was selling out? 

Would you make something that in the making also made you happy? Or would you seek out a final product that better defined you externally to others regardless of the enjoyment your would get from making it? Or is that the same thing? I think about it myself and I’m not sure if the things I do well for others are what make me the happiest.

What would you make?