The Impact of Our Lives

Healing Conversations - Reflections Series

Dear Friends, I wish you all the best as we enter the new year. This month’s Reflection asks: How do we live with meaning in these times of so much turmoil? How can we nurture a future we may never see? (As a reminder, I am now including an audio version immediately below the photo.)

One July morning, I drove up into the Oakland hills to walk among the redwoods. Patches of sunlight shone through the dense branches onto the path before me. The still-cool air was fresh and fragrant; there were no other humans in sight. I was drawn to a circle of eleven trees with the decaying remains of a huge stump in the center. It was easily eight feet across, the Mama. I sat on the ground beside her and listened. This is legacy, the trees told me. Long after the Mother Tree was gone, the children that rose from her nourishing root stood tall and strong together, with their own tender progeny forming a ring around them at their feet. Even when the body of the Mother Tree has crumbled completely back into the soil, her presence will live on through those generations, as she herself grew from the life-force and bodies of those before her… Legacy: giving our life-force to nurture a future we will never see.

How do we measure the impact of our lives? As I write this question, the answer I hear is “in faithfulness.” It’s not the answer I expected, nor one I have heard before in considering this question. Yet it makes so much sense. We may not ever know the number of people we touch, or what ripples of influence spread from each of those touches. But it was never a numbers game to begin with; it’s about being faithful to our purpose in the evolution of Life.

Our role may be to nurture one child who then goes on to change the world. Or to influence somebody who guides somebody who teaches somebody who touches somebody who changes the world. Or perhaps the world change comes not through outer actions at all, but through being part of a small shift in collective consciousness. It may seem almost inconsequential at the fulcrum, however extended out across time yields an entirely different trajectory.

Think about it: if you are traveling in a straight line your destination will be a point further out on that line, but if you alter the angle of your direction even a fraction and keep going forward from there, you’ll end up in an entirely different place.

It’s the same with one’s inner journey, or if our travels are not in a straight line (because, really, our journeys are more often in spirals or loops or other formations). When we tell the story about the person or event that “changed our life,” it is this alteration in trajectory—sometimes dramatic, sometimes subtle, but in hindsight pivotal. What does this mean for us now, in the collective, as we stand at the pivot point between annihilation and transformation? How many shifts in individual consciousness does it take to alter the trajectory of collective consciousness? And given the stakes, how can we do anything less than everything possible to contribute to this shift.

I had always thought about legacy as an individual contribution, something we do that we will be remembered for—books written, institutions founded, service given, money bequeathed to a worthy cause, or the difference we have made in people’s lives. The insight that came through this morning’s meditation was that perhaps the greatest impact we can make may not be through individual accomplishments at all, but in merging our life-force energy with the countless others across generations committed to healing and transformation. It’s possible that this might be our most enduring legacy, changing the trajectory of collective consciousness and thereby shaping the world for generations to come.

As we enter a new calendar year, many people turn toward inner reflection and visioning for the future. So I invite you to consider what it would mean to make your life be a gift to Life—the larger wholeness that breathes through everything. To put all that you are, all that you have been through, in service to this. What world would it create? Begin to inhabit it now.

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This post is adapted from my forthcoming book.

Photo by Veronica Gomez Ibarra on UnSplash.