Impact

This post is my entry for November’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Alexandra.

What a great theme that can be approached from various perspectives. These are my favorite types of IndieWeb Carnival themes since they force me to lean into introspection.

A clip that I’ve seen or heard a few times in the last two weeks is Mike Tyson speaking to a young interviewer about legacy and how it is a meaningless term that (according to Mike) has surged in popularity and is now overly abundant in people talking about themselves or overly dramatizing their existence. I mostly agree with Tyson’s statement, or at least the sentiment. Our time on this Earth is something that we tend to treat with some grandiose purpose when that time has come to a logical conclusion. In reality, the grandiose part is the journey itself, the life we’re living while still alive. The destination is death, since we all reach it and there is no avoiding the arrival. We return to the dust from which we came, and those that are still on the journey continue on theirs without us. It really is as simple as that. Tyson is specifically talking about legacy vs. impact. I think that the time that we spend here can offer profound impact, and that’s why I will choose to focus on that concept.

I never knew the impact that being a parent would have on my life. It should come as no surprise that I, like most, have an appreciation for my parents that has grown exponentially since becoming a parent myself. You learn so much about life through your children, and you learn more about your parents in the process as well. I have amazing parents and am beyond lucky to still have them. They’ve shaped my life at every phase and have had such a positive impact on me. It isn’t lost on me that many people’s parents have an impact on them that isn’t positive, yet it is an impact nonetheless. I’m fortunate and grateful that my parents represent only positive impact in my life.

Interestingly, people’s passing often gets referred to with the term “impact” in the negative sense. It is normal to focus on the loss, the subtraction, the missing piece that it represents to those that are “left behind”. By thinking about the impact of my parents on my life, I hope I have the capacity to frame it with that impact as the basis of my emotions. Mourning is a process, and sadness and suffering are inevitable to the human condition; however, so much of our emotional computation is formulaic. That isn’t to make it sound cold and predictable, but math is math, and emotions have their own arithmetic.

With that goal comes framing for what I hope my own impact is, with a focus on the lives of my own children. I hope to lead a life of similar impact to my own parents. I hope that impact is felt increasingly over my lifetime, not through proximity to me, but through the proximity of life’s experiences. I hope my impact is like that of gravitational pull, vs. that of an asteroid slamming into a planet. When I return to dust, I hope my impact is felt due to the addition I was when I was here and not the inevitable subtraction the event represents in the formula that is our existence.