Legacy-building with ripples
Brick by brick, fam
We’ve talked before about legacy-building moves (see this post and also this one). A tremendous example of legacy-building was recently in the news: Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, at long last, has a completion date, 144 years after the first stone was laid. Gaudi knew the structure wouldn’t be completed in his lifetime; he started anyway. I want us to channel that spirit in our writing today.
Set aside time today to free write into specific future points with your creative self. If everything went according to plan or even better, what ripple can you envision your creative work having made out in the world a year from now? Write about that. What are the first stones in your cathedral?
Then try to imagine the impact of your creative work 10 years from now, and write into that. Then, 25 years from now. What stones might you have set in place beyond foundational ones, in your cathedral?
But then, the game changes. Imagine 100 years in the future. What ripple could you send you into the world now that could have grown into a wave with the help of others? What cathedrals could you start that would still be growing and giving and sustaining others long after our lives are finished?
We don’t need to frame this as doing world-saving shit by ourselves. As I wrote in an earlier post:
One could easily argue that women running for office now couldn't have just *happened* in a void but happened because of the work of women before... organizing work done by, say, Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, and political barrier-breaking by Shirley Chisolm, and we could say none of their work could have happened without suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams, and their work couldn't have happened without the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft... etc. (That's a grossly over-simplified list, but you know what I mean.)Â
Point being: Mary Wollestonecraft didn’t create feminism, set up each iterative wave of it, nor did she organize getting the vote or running for office. She started and pushed into where she could and she pushed for impact. And that impact was a ripple, a link added to a chain. Let’s think and write deeply today about the ripples we’re making or that we want to make, the cathedral stones we wish to set in our lifetimes.
Let’s do that. You got this.
