Legacy of Ourselves

How unique are we?  I ask myself this question often.  It is said with certainty that history repeats itself.  Isn't it just as likely that people repeat themselves?

Everyone likes to think that they are different, in some way special inside.  To think that somehow in the formula that makes us who we are there is a unique ingredient, a secret recipe.  Perhaps there is, I still want to think so however, I am always amazed at how unoriginal I am.  Sometimes I think of an idea and will do what I couldn't fifteen years ago, search the internet.  Almost always I will find someone that had a similar idea or an equal thought.  Sure there are variances but at the core it's the same.

Perhaps it is the death of Steve Jobs that has me thinking about things.  He was truly an exception.  People like him are few and far between as their minds expand conceptually to areas where no one has been before.  They walk in a different world almost as if their genius lifts them above the sea of the rest of us.  They also tend to have few social skills as personified by Mark Zuckerberg but I suppose in life there must be trade offs.  Still, these men will be remembered long after their departures.  The will exist in the annals of history on lists containing names like Alexander Graham Bell and Albert Einstein and Madam Curie.  I believe I can say with great certainty, I will never be among them.

No, I am not that special.  I wonder how long the memory of me will remain when I am gone.  I suppose it will endure in the mind of my son and maybe his children if he has any.  Perhaps my friends that live longer than I will recall who I was in their lives.  After that, it will pretty much be over.  Even those that create things lose their identities in their own works.  If a panting survives how many will ever remember the painter.  I wrote a novel and at some point will finish a second.  I like to think that it might rest peacefully on the shelf of a library for future literary explorers to pull  down at some point and blow the dust off.  On the other hand, books seem to be vanishing like the Dodo bird and soon my literary epoch might exist only in the code of 0s and 1s.  Some day it will be deleted with a simple key stroke.  It is sad to think that so much of the stuff we have created in the course of living our lives will likely far outlast ourselves.  The remnant of a plastic bottle will scare the earth longer than our memory.

I suppose in the end if our memory didn't fade, the world would become clogged with the existence of so many that have come and gone.  Perhaps it is best so few have left a mark.  If everyone did, the memory of the world might become clogged with the identities of the past and sacrifice the identities of the future.  If the past is prologue someday I will walk the planet again.  Oh it won't be me, just a rebirth of who I was in a new form.  They will have the same habits, the same ideas.  The same things will make them laugh and make them cry.  It will be a person that will likely ask themselves, "How unique am I?"