On Legacy...

2020 - What a Year! And we are only half way through...

We have seen Fires burning our country, hail the size of oranges fell from the sky a month later. Then there were floods. Actually I'm not even sure that's the order - the natural disasters were hitting us thick and fast...

"At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else." Greta Thunberg

By March the plague had hit and we were closing down whole cities because people were dying, in their 10's, then 100's, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands.

By June we saw people dying in the streets, not from the plague, but at the hands of those who should be protecting us. And the people rose up in protest.

"The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be an anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward."  Ijeoma Oluo

I look at the world today and I see a world burning, whether from climate change or from the anger of people fighting to bring change where there was only denial and stagnation before. There are so many guidelines, rules and lines in place to give the impression that there is order in the chaos. But, they are an illusion - none of them do anything but slow down progress, and block change. The Startup Founders know this. The Tech disruptors have proved this. But still we wait, still we hope.

But the truth is, no-one is coming to save us. If we want to get out of this year alive... or at least with any sort of respect for who we are as human beings, we have to stop waiting, and we have to start doing. And we have to chose - what we want to do, and who we want to be.

These are dark times, and we can sink into despair, or we can wait for the politicians to save us all (Hint: neither of these are solutions) OR we can start doing good things for other people. We can take small (or larger) steps to put more good into the world. We can make changes to reduce our carbon footprint. We can invest money in people that matter. We can choose to be a hero or a villain - there is no middle ground.

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

Viktor E. Frankl

I've been thinking a lot recently, about how crazy the world seems right now. It's easy to feel helpless. To watch in a kind of morbid fascination, as if there is nothing I can do, nothing I can change.

But, then I remember one word - Legacy.

After I am gone, what do I want to be remembered for? It's important to me that I am remembered for putting more good into the world. For helping those around me. For raising up those that I can. And so I will try, every day, to do that.

What about you? Have you ever thought about it? What do you want your legacy to be?