Theme
Legacy
Quote
“The mirrour sheweth us not what we would leave behind, but what we have been.” The Mirrour Which Flatters Not
The Myth of Legacy
“The desire for immortality is the desire for the survival of a name.” George Santayana
Legacy is a word I approach with skepticism, and that skepticism has been trained into me rather than merely felt. As a student and teacher of history, I have learned to be wary of stories that arrive already polished. Of narratives that present themselves as coherent, intentional, and morally resolved. Legacy, as it is most often invoked, is precisely that kind of story. It presumes scale. It assumes durability. It suggests that a life can be rendered legible to history in a way that resists erosion. The mirror, when placed before such claims, disrupts them almost immediately.
If the mirror has taught me anything this year, it is that legacy may be the most persistent form of self-deception left once other illusions have fallen away.
The mirror restores proportion. It does not enlarge the self, nor does it diminish it out of cynicism. It simply reveals scale. And scale, once seen clearly, becomes an ethical corrective. Most lives do not register historically. Most actions leave no archival trace. Most intentions dissolve long before they are remembered. The mirror does not treat this as tragedy. It treats it as truth.
I was reminded of this years ago when someone gave me a copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. For the person who handed it to me, the book was not merely influential, it was formative. It had given them direction, a vocabulary for success, and a framework through which they understood both effort and reward. In that sense, the book “worked.” Yet as I read it, I felt an unease I could not immediately name. The claims felt too smooth, the authority too conveniently borrowed. It took little investigation to uncover what historians have long known: Hill never met Andrew Carnegie, despite building his entire mythology around that supposed mentorship. His ideas bore little resemblance to Carnegie’s own reflections on wealth, philanthropy, and responsibility.
My initial reaction was frustration at the deception itself. Frustration with the way Hill appropriated the success of others to fabricate a legacy for himself. But that reaction did not hold for long. What followed was something more complicated. This, after all, is how myths are made. The historian in me rejects such fabrication outright. The teacher in me, however, recognizes how stories, true or not, can orient behavior and provide coherence. And the part of me that understands religion as a human art form rather than a metaphysical system recognizes this pattern immediately. Humans have always told stories not simply to record facts, but to communicate meaning.
Not all myths are equal: some orient us toward responsibility, while others anesthetize us against it.
The mirror does not resolve this tension between truth and usefulness. It exposes it. It asks not whether a story inspires, but what it conceals. It does not deny that myths can shape lives; it questions who benefits from their circulation and at what cost. Legacy narratives often function not as moral reflections, but as instruments of anxiety management, particularly for those with power enough to worry about how history will judge them.
This becomes especially visible in religious contexts shaped by prosperity theology. Growing up, I encountered countless interpretive maneuvers designed to reconcile wealth with divine favor. Material success was framed as evidence of God’s blessing. Financial abundance became a proxy for righteousness. Legacy, in this framework, was measured in endowments, buildings, and estate plans. It was measured in the visible assurances that one’s life would continue to exert influence after death. The church itself became both beneficiary and validator of this narrative.
Yet the religious texts most often cited in these traditions resist such certainty. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24, New Revised Standard Version). The sheer number of explanations offered to soften that statement, to render it metaphorical, symbolic, or contextually obsolete, reveals how uncomfortable we are with relinquishing control over judgment. Legacy, in this sense, becomes transactional. Wealth is exchanged for reassurance. Narrative is substituted for reckoning.
The mirror is unmoved by such transactions. It does not negotiate with intention. It does not reward generosity if generosity is deployed as insulation against judgment. It simply reflects. And what it reflects is uncomfortable: that legacy, as it is commonly imagined, is less about influence than about control. Control over how one is remembered, and more fundamentally, control over how one hopes to be judged.
When I turn the mirror toward myself, I am not spared this realization. The mirror resists my own attempts at narrative control just as firmly. It shows me as I am: incomplete, flawed, and fundamentally incapable of governing how others see me. Despite my efforts to write, to reflect, and to articulate meaning through this project and others like it, I cannot determine how I will be understood. I cannot curate my memory. I cannot secure my reputation. This is true now, while I am alive, and it will be even more so when there is no one left who remembers the living version of me at all.
In some small and honest way, this work, this sustained self-examination, this careful articulation, is itself an attempt at control. Not an attempt at legacy in the monumental sense, but a quieter hope that meaning might be stabilized long enough to be recognized. The mirror does not condemn that impulse. It simply refuses to flatter it. As Ecclesiastes reminds us, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Reflection does not grant permanence. It grants clarity.
Legacy, when stripped of myth, monument, and anxiety, becomes something less grand but more truthful. It is not a story we write about ourselves. It is a residue we leave behind: unintended, untraceable, and ultimately beyond our control. If this is what the mirror reveals about legacy, then what remains is not how large a life appears, but how it moves within the current of others.
Pebbles, Rivers, and the Ethics of Smallness
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Harry S. Truman
There is comfort in smallness. I do not experience that comfort as resignation or defeat, but as release. To see oneself as a pebble in the river of time rather than a boulder lodged against it is to be freed from a particular burden. The burden of needing to matter in ways that are publicly legible, competitively measured, or historically durable. The mirror does not diminish me by revealing my smallness; it steadies me by removing expectations I was never meant to carry.
Smallness, understood this way, is not the absence of ambition. It is the refusal of distortion.
When I no longer feel compelled to be “important,” I am released from comparison. Life ceases to be a contest in which meaning is awarded to the most visible, the most productive, or the most praised. I am no longer required to surveil myself constantly, measuring each decision against how it might read later be that on a résumé, in a biography, or in the imagined summary of a life. The mirror interrupts that internal accounting. It reminds me that a résumé is not a life, and that an obituary, especially one written in advance, often functions less as reflection than as performance.
This freedom allows a different kind of honesty to emerge. Radical honesty does not mean confession for its own sake. It means the ability to admit limits without apology, to acknowledge uncertainty without shame, and to live without the low-grade anxiety of recognition. I still have ambition. I still care about doing meaningful work. But I am no longer compelled to orient myself toward unrealistic milestones designed to justify my existence to an imagined audience. I do not need my life to read well at a distance.
The mirror, by restoring scale, makes that possible.
I saw this distinction clearly through a friend who was dying of cancer. Near the end of his life, he chose to write his own obituary. It was long, detailed, and expansive. It was an accounting of accomplishments, affiliations, and milestones. It read as a deliberate attempt to secure significance, to stabilize how he would be remembered. There was nothing dishonest in it, but there was something strained. It felt performative, shaped by the same pressures that had governed much of his public life.
After his death, something else happened. His friends went back through years of his Facebook posts—small, daily reflections, observations, jokes, frustrations, and moments of insight—and compiled them into a book, a daily devotional. It was not grand. It was not comprehensive. But it was unmistakably him. The voice was intact. The humor survived. The thoughtfulness remained. What emerged was not a monument, but a presence.
Placed side by side, the difference was striking. How he wanted to be remembered and how he was remembered were not the same thing. The obituary aimed at control. The book revealed continuity. One was intentional. The other was preserved by accident.
This is where the river matters.
The river of time does not honor intention. It does not preserve what we labor to stabilize. Instead, it weathers. It erodes. It smooths the sharp edges of performance and allows what is repeated, habitual, and unguarded to endure. What survives is not what we announce, but what we enact without thinking. The river keeps what fits its current.
The mirror prepares us for this truth by loosening our grip on authorship. It teaches that meaning disperses faster than we expect, and that this dispersal is not loss but transformation. To be a pebble is not to disappear; it is to be carried. Influence travels not because it is designed to, but because it is caught up in motion larger than itself.
Seen this way, smallness becomes an ethical stance. It resists the temptation to curate a life for later consumption. It privileges presence over projection, honesty over performance, and responsibility over recognition. It allows a person to act without constantly asking how those actions will be interpreted once the actor is gone.
The mirror does not ask me to abandon ambition. It asks me to abandon preoccupation with credit. Like Truman’s observation suggests, much becomes possible once the question of recognition is set aside. Work can be done for its own sake. Care can be extended without calculation. Words can be spoken without rehearsing how they might echo later.
In the end, the pebble does not decide where the river flows. It does not determine how long it will be carried or where it will come to rest. Its ethical task is simpler and more demanding: to be shaped honestly by the current it inhabits, and to allow that shaping to occur without resistance.
If legacy dissolves under the mirror’s gaze, smallness remains. It remains not as insignificance, but as fidelity to the scale at which life is actually lived.
Continuity Without Monuments
“What we give away is what we keep.” St. Francis of Assisi
When I think of my grandmother now, what rises first is not conflict, nor even grief. It is care. Ordinary, repeated, unremarkable care. I remember how she looked after a friend’s mother. I remember how she visited elderly, often widowed women from her church bringing them newspapers, taking them out for ice cream, washing and trimming their hair at her own home. These were not grand gestures. They were small human comforts, offered without fanfare, that kept people engaged with life and preserved their dignity.
The mirror teaches me to attend to this distinction. Continuity does not announce itself. It does not arrive as virtue or legacy. It forms quietly, through acts that seem too small to matter at the time they are given.
What my grandmother understood, long before I had language for it, was that near the end of life, people often want nothing more complicated than to be seen. Not evaluated. Not rescued. Simply remembered as still present in the world. When I would stop by her house unannounced with a pizza for us to share, I could tell that meant more to her than any gift I might have brought. Me showing up was the gift. Me sitting with her was the gift. Time, offered without agenda, carried more weight than anything wrapped or purchased.
She taught me this long before I was able to return it. And when it became my turn to care for her, to show up, to sit, to remain present without fixing, I did. Only now, looking back through the mirror, can I see how quietly important those moments were. They did not feel consequential at the time. They were simply what love looked like when stripped of performance.
The mirror clarifies how continuity actually forms. It does not move forward toward remembrance; it moves sideways through repetition. Influence travels not because it is intended to, but because it is enacted again and again until it becomes invisible. What my grandmother gave to others, she gave without thinking of how it would be remembered. And what I gave back to her emerged not as obligation, but as recognition. As recognition shaped by years of watching how care is practiced.
This becomes especially clear as I move through the practical work of executing her will and distributing her possessions. The material remnants of her life, few and modest as they are, are valued differently by the people who receive them. When I see a cup from the dollar store that I know she used every day, I do not see its monetary worth. I see the imprint of her life. I see mornings, routines, habits so consistent they left a mark deeper than ornament ever could.
As executor, I have been struck by how time spent with her alters how people assign value. Objects do not carry meaning evenly. They absorb it through proximity. Through use. Through presence. The mirror reveals that continuity is not housed in things themselves, but in the relationships that once gathered around them.
One moment, in particular, stays with me. While inventorying her china hutch, I found a rock and a piece of red glass. Around the rock was a small slip of paper from her sister. It read, simply: “Remember how we used to play house with rocks and glass.” These were the toys of her childhood. She had grown up in extreme poverty on a farm outside a small community in southwest Missouri. What she had was imagination and a dozen mostly older siblings. Nothing more.
That she kept these objects, not displayed, not explained, but quietly stored, tells me everything I need to know about continuity. They were not relics. They were reminders. Not of deprivation, but of resilience. Not of hardship, but of the capacity to make a life out of what is given. The mirror does not elevate these objects into symbols. It lets them remain what they are: evidence of a way of living that never required monuments.
What surprises me most in all of this is not sorrow, but gratitude. A quiet gratitude for the life she lived and the scale at which she lived it. Gratitude for care that did not seek recognition. For presence that did not demand return. For dignity preserved in others without ever being named as such.
Continuity, I am learning, does not depend on memory alone. Memory fades. Stories shift. What endures is valuation: the way time spent together reshapes how we see the world, how we treat others, how we show up without keeping score. The mirror reveals that this kind of influence does not belong to history. It belongs to life as it is actually lived.
There is no monument to this form of care. No inscription. No guarantee it will be remembered beyond those it touched directly. And yet, it moves forward all the same passed on not as legacy, but as practice. As showing up. As seeing. As small human comforts offered at precisely the scale where they matter most.
Religion as Mirror, Not a Promise
“Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.” Alfred North Whitehead
I grew up hearing a single refrain repeated whenever death entered the room: absence from the body is presence with the Lord. It was offered as comfort, as certainty, and often as closure. I do not believe in a literal heaven, nor in an afterlife beyond memory and influence. And yet that phrase has stayed with me. Not because I believe it to be true, but because I have come to understand what it was doing.
Religion, at its most functional, does not answer unanswerable questions. It supplies orientation. It gives people language when language fails. It offers forms—phrases, rituals, images—that allow grief to be held communally rather than privately endured. The mirror helps me see this clearly. It does not ask whether the promise is real. It asks what work the promise performs.
For many, that refrain transformed death into something to be celebrated rather than grieved. It replaced uncertainty with assurance and finality with reunion. I understand the appeal of that move. But for me, believing in something I experience as untrue, even when it is comforting, pulls attention away from the present and relocates meaning elsewhere. It risks orienting people toward a future they imagine rather than toward the life they are still living. In that sense, certainty becomes a kind of anesthetic. It dulls the demand of the moment.
The mirror resists this displacement. It does not forbid religious language, but it constrains its claims. When I think of religion as art, as an accumulated human response to suffering, wonder, and loss, it becomes most honest when it helps us understand how to live, not what comes next. Or, at the very least, when it helps us approach death with dignity rather than denial.
This distinction mattered deeply to me as my grandmother weakened. Near the end of her life, she began to see individuals: her sister, a young boy, and a young girl. I find the phenomenon itself fascinating. Do I believe their spirits literally appeared to her? No. That would require belief in a soul in a way I do not hold. But I do believe the experience was real to her, and that the comfort it provided was real as well.
The mirror allowed me to affirm that truth without translating it into belief.
What those visions revealed was not metaphysical reality, but relational reality. Her sister had held a place in her heart that no one else could occupy. That she appeared in my grandmother’s most vulnerable moments tells me everything about how her life had been oriented: toward connection, toward memory, toward care. The children, to my mind, functioned as angels in her symbolic world. That is, not as beings with wings, but as figures of gentleness, innocence, and protection. They were not evidence of heaven. They were expressions of how she made sense of comfort.
Religion, seen through the mirror, reflects the architecture of a person’s inner life. It shows us what they love, what they fear, and what they need in order to rest. It does not require assent in order to be honored. Meaning does not become false simply because it is symbolic.
This understanding has shaped how I chose to show up for her. When there was nothing I could say that would not feel either hollow or dishonest, what I had to offer was presence. Being there without judgment. Without expectation. Without translation. I could not share her language of faith, but I could share my time. I could show her that she mattered by spending time with her, by arriving unannounced with pizza or an ice cream cone, by sitting quietly, by listening, and by holding her hand until the end.
And when it came to her rituals, I honored them not as beliefs I shared, but as practices that ordered her life. Every Sunday at eleven, sharing a meal as a family mattered to her. So I gave up my Sundays. I gave them as an act of fidelity. Presence, in that moment, meant entering her world without insisting it become mine.
The mirror clarifies this ethic. It asks me not to choose between truth and comfort, but to be faithful to presence. Truth without presence becomes cruelty. Comfort without presence becomes abstraction. Presence holds both without forcing resolution. It is what remains when belief falls silent and certainty proves inadequate.
Religion, at its best, does not promise what it cannot deliver. It reflects who we are when we are most alone. It offers forms sturdy enough to hold grief without pretending to explain it away. In that sense, religion as mirror does not lead us out of the world. It returns us to it. It returns us more attentive, more humane, and more willing to show up when meaning cannot be spoken.
A Year in the Mirror
“We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey
I began this year with an old maxim—Know thyself—and with a book that refused to flatter me. In January, the mirror felt confrontational. It promised exposure rather than insight, judgment rather than clarity. Even as I committed myself to sustained reflection, I suspected that what awaited me was mostly dissection: an inventory of flaws, habits, and failures laid bare under an unforgiving light. I worried that looking honestly would mean discovering only what was lacking, misshapen, or compromised.
That fear proved unfounded.
What the year revealed instead was not ease, but proportion. The mirror did not absolve me, but neither did it reduce me to my worst moments. Month by month, as I turned toward parts of my past I would have preferred to leave unexamined, I discovered something quieter and more enduring than judgment: understanding. There are still things I have not said and truths that remain too raw or too complex to set down in language. But I can see them now. The darker, hidden nooks are no longer amorphous or unnamed. They are visible for what they are. And that alone has altered my relationship to them.
Over time, my understanding of the mirror itself changed. I had assumed its purpose was exposure, to show me how ugly I might be if I looked closely enough. What I found instead was recognition. The mirror did not flatter me, but it also did not lie by omission. Alongside regret and responsibility, it reflected patience, care, resilience, and an ability to change. Looking honestly allowed me to see that I am not all bad after all. There are parts of me that are worth celebrating, not because they redeem the rest, but because they coexist with it.
There was a moment when this shift became unmistakable. When I publicly acknowledged my DWI, something fundamental changed. That experience had long ruled me through fear. Through fear of how others would see me, fear of what it said about my character, fear of being reduced to a single failure. Naming it did not erase its consequences, nor should it have. But it altered the relationship I had with it. I could see my actions clearly. I could take responsibility for them. And I could also see how I had changed in response. In that moment, the mirror ceased to be something I held at arm’s length. I stepped into it.
That is when reflection stopped being an exercise and became a posture.
Looking back across the year now, I can see how this practice carried me through moments I could not have anticipated. How it carried me through grief, through loss, through the slow and disorienting work of sorting what remains when a life ends. The mirror did not provide answers. It provided steadiness. It reminded me that understanding unfolds over time, that meaning emerges through attention, and that self-knowledge is less about resolution than about willingness to remain present with what is unresolved.
This is how my New Year’s resolution was fulfilled, not through completion, but through integration. Even if I am no longer writing under the banner of a formal resolution, this practice will stay with me. Reflection has become a primary way I experience the world. It always was, in some measure, but this year made it intentional. Disciplined. Honest. That change will endure.
The mirror places no grand demand on me going forward. It does not insist on continual confession or endless self-scrutiny. Its obligation is quieter and more exacting: to remain honest without becoming cruel, to resist both self-deception and self-erasure, and to continue attending to my life as it is actually lived. If there is growth to be had, it will come not from spectacle or self-judgment, but from fidelity to this practice: an ongoing commitment to character, to public and private virtue, and to presence in the world I inhabit.
I began this year wondering whether the mirror could ever show the whole truth. I end it knowing that it does not need to. It has shown me enough: enough to live more attentively, enough to carry forward what matters, and enough to set it down without regret.
The mirror no longer needs to be held.
It has already done its work.