A great initial driver for us establishing this blog as older parents was to create, collate and document a record of experiences we felt might be valuable and that friends and family could therefore refer to in our absences for any reason in the future.
We cover what we consider to be important about this in our post entitled "Leverage the Stressbusting™ Wisdom of Age".
We talked about the practical steps that can be taken to create a financial legacy in our post entitled "Wills, Insurance, Powers of Attorney & Life Planning as Stressbusting™ Essentials".
But finances are not the end of the story in terms of creating a legacy.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a 2nd type of legacy which has no reference to financial matters and which reads:-
“Something that it part of your history or that remains from an earlier time”.
So, a non financial legacy could be negative – for example, we will all suffer from the legacy of pollution for centuries to come.
Or a non financial legacy could be positive – we will all benefit, for example, from the legacy left by the inventor of the Internet.
There is additionally no reason a positive legacy cannot be created during a person’s lifetime and be enjoyed by that person during their lifetime.
But we as humans tend to be somewhat reflective in nature, and this can lead to time wastage and stagnation.
It is important to learn from the lessons of our past and traumas endured – we address this in our previous post entitled "Learn to Expect (and Accept) the Unexpected to Stressbust™ More Effectively".
But it is equally important that we let go of our pasts to some extent in order that they do not start to define us or our present, and therefore prevent us building a positive legacy for the future.
The old saying that “everyone has skeletons in their closet” has relevant application here.
We have all had events in our life that we regret or feel we might have dealt with differently with hindsight, but this acknowledgement is an excellent achievement of tself.
Undue further reflection and preoccupation with these self perceived failures or fear of them reoccurring does not add anything to the lessons already learned.
We have to instead trust ourselves not to repeat the errors by committing to a new form of being.
The 1st step in this process is to determine what kind of positive legacy we would like to leave in the future (regardless of our past), any why.
In our case, the subject of Wellness that is captured by the process of stressbusting™ is something we feel very captivated and passionate about, to the extent that we often find ourselves drafting new posts in the middle of the night.
It also helps validate our core values of sharing, helping and educating – values that the creation of our Family Crest referenced in our post entitled "Design a Stressbusting™ Family Crest" assisted greatly in formulating.
Creating a legacy does not mean asking ourselves the morbid question of “How we would like to be remembered by others after we are gone”, but rather “how we would like to be viewed by others while we are here”.
This involves, in other words, the creation of a ‘living legacy’.
We found it a useful exercise to write down in no more than 3 lines what we wanted our living legacy to be, so we could cross refer back to it and enhance it if the opportunity arose.
This could include themes like generosity, helpfulness, courage, calmness, reliability, strength, approachability, contentment – it is really down to each individual.
If people then don’t view us according to that perception we hold of ourselves and that we are aspiring to, this will naturally be a cause for self concern and stress.
This may therefore involve us revisiting our actual conduct to establish if we are in some kind of denial (see our post entitled "The Dangers of Denial to StressBusting™") or using "The Mirror Diffuser Strategy for Stressbusting™" (see our post so entitled) to see if we are reflecting an image to the outside world that accurately reflects our intentions or whether we are instead unhelpfully hanging on to the past to prevent us having to face the future.
And it is amazing how often we find that it is our Past holding us back unnecessarily, and stopping us from being able to "Relax into the Dance of Life" (see our post so entitled).
If this is so, we need to again thank and validate the Past for the part it has played in teaching us and making us what we are now, but then to start to live in a focused, forward looking way that creates the living legacy we want to create and to be recognised for from now on.
See our post entitled "Break Time Quickie - "Imagine2Create"" for further tips in this regard.
And in the case of the living legacy left by the inventor of the Internet given above, it is worth remembering that he gave the Internet to the world at large free of charge – a real time example of the value to stressbusting™ of an act of charity as described in our recent post entitled "Stressbusting™ Lessons from Finland - “The Happiest Nation on Earth”"......
We hope this post and the related posts referenced provide useful food for thought.
Big Love, MikeyM&LouLoU™😚🙂💯❤💙💜 xxxxxx