Living Our Legacy
In our end of life doula classes, we teach the great power and importance of doing legacy work as a person approaches death. We also emphasize to students that the time to start doing legacy work is right now, wherever you are in your life’s journey. Why wait to think about or, for that matter, to work on your legacy—because, we are creating that legacy right now in living our lives. In fact, you might look at your life as an on-going, evolving legacy project.
I know in the immediacy of the class presentation and the legacy exercises people feel deeply touched by this idea. I suspect that many students leave the class with some inner commitment to work on their legacy more consciously. But I also know how hard it is to hold on to that commitment in the day-to-day demands and pressures of living.
This is true for me too. As much as I recognize and speak about the tremendous value of paying attention to one’s legacy, I also forget to think about or work on my legacy with the kind of intentionality such efforts deserve. Perhaps because I’m getting older, the call to legacy has shown up more insistently in my life recently. So, I’ve been thinking how I can hold on to the idea of legacy at the ground level, where I live my life each day.
I have also been reading about legacy and came upon a fascinating concept called YOU 177, which is an initiative of the Legacy Project, an independent, research, education, and social change organization. The idea for YOU 177 comes from Susan Bosak, a social researcher who also helped found the Legacy Project. YOU 177 is about creating what Bosak calls a 7-generation world. She describes that in a TEDxStouffville talk as “a psychosocial way of being that fosters bigger thinking and actions.” We need that bigger approach, claims Bosak, in order to address the large, complex and interconnected challenges we are facing in our world today.
The YOU in YOU 177 is each one of us living in this world. To solve our challenges, we need each person to take an active role in this 1 world, across 7 generations, and with a commitment to the 7 billion people living on the planet. The idea of thinking about our impact across seven generations comes from a principle taught by Native Americans and codified in the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy created in the 12th century. Bosak uses this concept to ask people to think bigger about the issues we face and to think across generations.
A 7-generation world requires two things, according to Bosak: generations and legacy. The generations are the external part of achieving a 7-generation world. Because we can touch the lives of our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, we can touch in a concrete way a time beyond ourselves. Plus, we can connect that future to the three generations that preceded us and may still be living. Bosak believes that incorporating the energy and ideas across this rich terrain of generations—in a strategic and meaningful way—will be transformational.
YOU 177 began in a very practical way last year in the Toronto area. According to Brian Puppa, the Executive Director of the Legacy Project, youth and older adults are starting community-based projects to plant trees, to encourage people to decrease their carbon footprint, and do energy retrofits to their homes, among other things. “The hope is that Toronto becomes a model that will spread to other communities, helping to create the 7-generation world Susan Bosak envisions.”
The inner part of creating a 7-generation world is legacy. “We create our legacy through our lifetime, from childhood, with every choice we make,” says Bosak. “Your legacy is the most powerful part of you. It is the part that matters. It is the part that will last… We need to own it consciously and nurture it actively.” Our individual legacies multiply across generations and across the world.
Thinking about YOU 177 has encouraged me to think even more broadly about legacy for myself and as part of the doula approach. Of course, in terms of the global issues we face, YOU 177 presents a big picture view that I think is quite valuable. I care about those problems deeply and think about my role in addressing them as I live my daily life. But the ideas Bosak talks about have started to live inside me in a way that impacts how I think about legacy in a much more personal way.
Someday I will be actively dying. I will be the person in the bed reviewing my life story and contemplating my impact on those I love and have lived among. Will my legacy already be firmly planted in the hearts and minds of the people I have touched? Will I have lived my legacy well, creating the kind of impact that is meaningful to me and will hopefully reverberate across the generations that follow me? These questions aren’t about being remembered; they are about doing something that matters—living my values and beliefs.
How different would the world be if, in Bosak’s words, each one of us consciously lived our legacy throughout our lives? How different would the world be if the elders among us modeled that degree of consciousness for the children in their lives?
As a result of thinking about this, I have decided to live my legacy more consciously. At the end of each day, I ask myself: “Did I attend to my legacy today?” This isn’t just about the things I did in the day, about the accomplishments, it’s more importantly about how I did them. Did I act in a way that mirrors the values and beliefs I wish to live by, which will become my legacy? After spending some quiet time answering those questions I write about them in my newly started “Legacy Journal.”
Every three months I intend to take a silent day to review my journal, walk in the woods, contemplate my legacy and see how I might nurture it in the time ahead. In this way, I hope to live my legacy much more deliberately and mindfully. I hope some of you reading this article decide to join me in these efforts, whether you follow my example or find your own approach to taking a more active role in your living legacy.
When it comes to doing legacy work with dying people, perhaps we can find ways to expand how people understand legacy. Once a dying person and/or the adults in their life have had a chance to think about and discuss a legacy project, it would be very impactful to incorporate the children in their lives—to make them a part of what that legacy project is all about. And, what if legacy was seen not just as a way to capture the meaning of the dying person’s life and their past, but as a way to impact the future. What if the younger adults or children in the circle of people around the dying person took on the mission of not only carrying the legacy but envisioning how to make that legacy even bigger in the future, to incorporate a 7-generation way of living in the world?
I hope the questions I have been exploring with you become questions you explore for yourself—both in the way you live your legacy and in the way you work with dying people when you have that opportunity. I have no doubt that if we all owned living our legacy throughout our lives, the world would be very different and much richer for it.