All the ways we want to be remembered
What kind of legacy do you want to leave?
Hey friends,
I hope you’re all travelling well! I find December quite a tricky time in many ways and for many reasons, but I also love the “closure” energy - where we get to shut the door on the year just gone and welcome in a new era.
Of course, you can do this at any time, but the end of the year feels like a natural conclusion; a hard reset. For those open to it, it can be the perfect time to check in with ourselves and get clear on where we are vs. where we want to be, and what we’re doing vs. what we wish we were doing.
While it may seem a little morbid to some, one of my favourite ways to think about this is to think of all the things I’d like to be remembered for - especially as someone who doesn’t want children.
In this day and age, we’re all pretty much guaranteed to leave some kind of footprint in the world; an echo of who we were, what we stood for, what we believed in, and what we spent our short and precious time here on this planet doing.
I just want to be a little more intentional about what it is that people will find.
I’m sure part of this is because, as someone who has “lost” their mother to Alzheimer’s, there have also been plenty of times in this journey where I’ve wished I could go back and tune into some of my mum’s deeper thoughts and wisdom.
She was of one of the last “invisible generations”; she wasn’t on social media, never wrote a journal, and didn’t really send “deep” messages or emails. She has a footprint, sure, but it’s mostly all around her work, which is great, but it also feels a bit 2D, especially when you crave that deeper connection.
For now, all I really have to go on are photos and my memories, and those of everyone else who knew her, which, with something like Alzheimer’s, feels complicated, too.
It’s also kind of shitty to think about, but given that it runs in family lines, I also know that there’s a high likelihood of me ending up going down the same path.
Yet, while none of us can know what the future might hold, we can all prepare for it in our own little ways.
Half of me feels that everything I write and share now - all the breadcrumbs I leave - may one day be a pathway for people who potentially have to look after me to get to know things about me when I don’t even know myself anymore.
Of course, I hope it never comes to that. But, as a writer, I still love the idea of writing my own stories and my own legacy. I love knowing that my words will likely outlive me, be it on here, social media, podcasts, my website, or the book I’m currently working on.
I also know that each year I’m lucky enough to be here I’m learning more, gaining more wisdom, and growing more into the person I desire to be, and I want to document - to track the passage of time and my own journey of evolution.
In all honesty, I used to cringe when I looked back at old posts, but now I’m so grateful for that younger version of me who laid the groundwork for me to become who I am today.
Tapping into the things I want to be remembered for feels like it’s given me way more compassion for that version of myself.
It’s also given me more direction than almost anything else in my life:
It’s helped me identify and lean into the things that light me up (in life and in business), prioritise what matters most, and shuffle some things around - like taking a backseat from travel writing.
It’s also given me the courage to take some leaps of faith and back myself; from sharing my writing to becoming a creative mentor - and to pitch myself for some other top-secret projects that are hopefully on the cards for next year.
As someone who is also very passionate about helping others step into the lives they want to be living, I wanted to both write this post and share one I wrote last year - almost a year ago to the day, incidentally - with the hope that this idea of leaning into how we want to be remembered might be a useful tool for you, too.
It’s funny because, even though I actually wrote it, reading it back still helped me reevaluate where I am and where I want to be, gave me some much-needed clarity as I end the year and close down some big chapters, and reminded me where the saying “When life gives you lemons…” came from.
It’s still one of my favourite posts I’ve written to date.
Wherever you are, I hope it helps. And if, like me, you find December a bit tricky and want some support or to dive in deeper, my 1:1 creative mentoring services are open for new and returning clients throughout the holiday period and into next year. I’m also currently running a special offer which I’ve shared at the end.
On that note, if you’re not quite ready to dive into 1:1 work yet, I’m also planning on running my first group creativity circle here in early January. It’ll probably be in Aus evening to catch Europe/UK in the morning, but I might run one for US time zones too if enough folks are interested (Aus morning/US evening). Let me know!
Oh, and if you’d like to share your legacy letter or anything you’d like to be known for, please do! I’d love to hear the things that come up for you as you read this.
Sending you so much love,
Cx
15/12/23: Lemonade Legacies
Hey friends,
It's hard to believe we're halfway through December already. Walking the cusp between this year and next. Counting down the days to the countdown.
I never used to be too bothered about New Year's - although I've always loved the December solstice - but, as we're counting down the days to 2024, I'm finding myself feeling a little caught up with it all.
Like many, I tend to have mixed feelings about the end of the year: not quite ready to let it go, to move all the things I didn't achieve from this year's to-do list to the next.
I often find it an unwelcome reminder of the passage of time. Another year older, another year wiser, another year of feeling even less like I have it all figured out - and another year of feeling slightly bad about it, and then reminding myself that actually, no, I’m exactly where I want to be.
We live in a society that puts so much pressure and emphasis on youth that we almost feel like we have to fast-track everything; that we’re not a success unless we’ve done X, Y, and Z by the time we hit our 30th birthday. After all, if we buy into this idea, we’ll know it’s all downhill from there.
Spoiler alert, it isn’t.
This idea of youth is just another thing that our society has commodified.
Unlike pretty much every other society that has ever existed on the planet and revered the Elders as the wisdom-keepers, we’ve knocked them off the top spot and sometimes even put literal children there instead. Because obviously the Forbes 30 Under 30 know things that people with nearly a century of life experience couldn’t possibly.
Although that sounds a little spicier than I meant it to, I find it frustrating.
We know, in theory, that good things take time, but we’ve also been bought up in a time of instant gratification, when we feel like we have to have achieved all the things we want in our lives, like yesterday.
Lemons can also be a good reminder that you can’t rush all these things, though. Some things take time - and that’s the way it should be.
It not only takes a lemon tree years to start producing lemons, but it can also take each lemon on the tree up to a year to ripen. That’s 12 months for a single lemon to get to the point that you can pick it and make it into lemonade (or do whatever else you want to do with your lemons).
It’s obviously an analogy, but this whole “life gives us lemons” thing is becoming more and more interesting the more I dive into it.
Being given a lemon feels a bit more like a gift than a curse, although I guess the same could be said about a lot of things in life, like, as we just mentioned, getting older and the passage of time.
And so, although I can’t quite believe it’s taken me until week #10 of writing Making Lemonade, but I’ve finally just gone on a deep dive into why we say “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”.
Dum, dum, dum….
It’s been attributed to many people over the years, but the closest I can seem to get is to Hobart Johnstone Whitley (H J Whitley), a Canadian-American real estate mogul and the “Father of Hollywood”, who, in the 1900s brought up 500 acres of lemon orchards in Southern California, cut them all down and turned them into the entertainment capital of the world.
Wow. It turns out life didn’t just give him lemons, he bought them and then squeezed them all under a bulldozer to make Hollywood.
Huh.
It’s a hell of a legacy - and one that, entirely accidentally, takes me nicely onto the theme of this week.
Legacies have been one of my special interest subjects ever since my grandad died when I was 18. I was tasked with reading out the eulogy at the funeral, but between that and the words of the funeral director, I felt like I learned more about him in his death than I knew in his life.
Granted, he’d also had dementia and I was probably too busy being a grumpy teenager to have asked him his life story before that, but still, it stuck with me.
It made me think about all the things we don’t know and all the things we lose when people leave this world; about what’s left when we - and everyone who we knew, loved, and shared our time on the planet with - is gone too.
About the things we leave behind. And about the ways we want our own stories to be remembered.
In my writing workshops, I talk about the idea of writing ethical wills and legacy letters.
A Jewish tradition that dates back to Biblical times, ethical wills have long existed as a way for people to pass down their morals and their beliefs to their descendants.
Our lives here are short and often filled with suffering and struggle, but in the midst of it there is so much beauty too, so much capacity for joy. So much wonder and wisdom to be learned and passed down.
And so, the idea of an ethical will is not to write a long autobiography or a memoir, but just a short 1-2 page document about your beliefs, your values, your interests, and all the other things that make life worth living for you.
Something special about you that you'd like passed down to future generations.
For many years, gravestones have been one of the few ways for us to learn about those who came before us.
This gravestone erected in memory of an Afghan cameleer who was buried on the outskirts of a cemetery near Coolgardie, Western Australia (non-Christian folk weren’t permitted to be buried in the main graveyard), says:
Sacred to the Memory of
Tach Mahomed
who died by the hand of an assassin
at Coolgardie, Jan 10th 1896
Aged 37 years.
His End was Peace
Oof.
Those four final words say so much and have stuck with me ever since - especially given the manner of his death.
What an incredible legacy.
I believe there’s a primal human desire in all of us to want to leave our mark on the world. And, as someone who does not want children of my own, I like the idea of leaving something behind.
If I’m being fully transparent, part of starting this Substack was to explore some of the ideas that have previously lived solely in my mind or scribbles in my journal. It’s a way for me to say, I was here, this was me. I existed, I lived.
I find it fascinating that for as long as humans have been able to write - or at least make shapes - we’ve been carving our marks into things as a way of leaving a tiny legacy.
When I was back in the UK visiting my family last September, we took a trip out to a castle near where we were staying. It was a cool castle, as castles go (you tend to be a bit spoiled with castles growing up in the UK), but the highlight, for me, was all the old graffiti.
For centuries, people had been visiting and carving their names into the exact same staircase. You could see the way that thousands of pairs of feet had worn out spots on the old stairs.
I loved the way it made me feel like I was in the presence of history. How I could almost imagine all the people who'd come before me, even despite knowing nothing of them other than their names and the years, carved in their own handwriting.
History, to me, is not only a great way to gain insights into our collective past but also a way to learn lessons from all the people who've come before us.
I genuinely believe it has the potential to help all of us be better humans - if only we were taught it better.
I know they say history is written by the victors, but I don't really subscribe to that. Maybe that’s because my own interest in history isn’t so much about kings and queens and leaders and empires, despite that being most of what I learned at school.
Instead, I find it far more interesting to think about everyday people.
The yous and mes of the world who came before us. The billions of people who have lived here on this planet over the years, with most of them leaving nothing behind. No markers, no reminders, just their genes, passed down from ancestor to ancestor, until eventually reaching the end of the line.
I think that's why I love ghost towns so much - because of how they give us a chance to see how normal people lived. Most of the time, they're just everyday places built by everyday people.
The only difference between them and normal towns, though, is that they were usually built in fairly inhospitable landscapes, which is why they've been spared the “bulldozer of progress”.
Like Hollywood, there are usually many layers of the past under all our towns. All the old legacies and lessons squeezed into the foundations beneath us and old dusty books on the back shelves of local libraries.
To me, those are the legacies I seek out. The ones I find far more interesting. The legacies of everyday people like you and me, just trying to eke out a living and find our place - and leave our mark - on this world.
And so, as we close out this year, I invite you to not only think about what the legacy of your year may look like - preferably from a personal perspective, not a professional one - but also to think about the idea of writing an ethical will; both as a way to leave your own mark on this world and a way to keep living your life aligned with who you want to be and how you want to be remembered.
Like our lemon mogul, who destroyed 500 acres of lemon trees and ended up remembered as the father of Hollywood. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it, but you can’t deny that it’s a pretty impressive legacy.
Still, here’s hoping we’ll be remembered for something a little more holistic.
Love always,
Cassie x
PS: I don’t condone scratching your name into things as a way to leave your own legacy these days, but I would love to hear what you’d like yours to be!
PPS: If you like reading my work and want to support me, please like this post, leave a comment, and, if you really love it, please share it with your friends. I really appreciate it - and appreciate you for being here. Thank you!
PPPS: I am still running a special 2-hour mentoring deep dive offer for $330AUD (£165GBP) for anyone looking to go on a journey of exploration and discovery before we move into 2025. If you’re interested, check out my website for more information and testimonials, drop me a line, or hit reply and we can have a chat!
Very beautiful reflection and contemplations for a sticky time of year. Thanks darlin!
“In all honesty, I used to cringe when I looked back at old posts, but now I’m so grateful for that younger version of me who laid the groundwork for me to become who I am today.”
Oh do I hear you on this. I used to want to wipe the old me from the internet, but I have so much compassion for her now, and the path she’s been on. Love the idea of thinking about our legacy. Could you maybe share some journaling prompts?