Anything but a Vanishing Act

Our footprints on the sands of time

“What dies doesn't vanish. It stays here in the world, transformed, dissolved, as pains of the world, and of you. Which are transformed in turn - without grumbling.”
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

We live in a celebrity culture where everyone wants to be known. Social media is both the connector of people globally as well as the springboard to fame for many. Some people want the attention for attention’s sake while others want it in order to make an impact on the world. 

Our time here is limited and within that time we search to leave our mark. But this often becomes conflated with celebrity, with “being famous.” While fame allows individuals to be known, it does not necessarily mean you are leaving a mark. 

The word character comes from the Greek word kharaktēr which was known as ‘a stamping tool’. These original stamping tools were used to leave “an impression upon a coin.” Building one’s character is much the same (hence the word), it is about leaving a virtuous impression, permanently, on oneself. A person of character embodies a virtuous spirit. It is through this, our virtuous self, that we leave an imprint on the world and those around us. 

We’re born in a flash and in a blink of an eye are gone. What stays is who we were, what we were made of, and how we made others feel. Our character is built by our actions and our actions shape the way we are perceived by others. While we come and go, the memory of those actions remains, much like the Longfellow poem reminds us: 

“Lives of great men all remind us 
  We can make our lives sublime, 
And, departing, leave behind us 
   Footprints on the sands of time”

When George Washington ended his second term as the first president of the United States, he did so understanding the ramifications of his actions. The entire presidency was new and Congress gave Washington the power and flexibility to make it how he saw fit. 

The responsibility he was handed was enormous. He spent his entire career trying to break the United States away from the monarchy and become its own independent nation, and now he was handed the keys to the country and provided unlimited power. He knew each of his actions would impact the future of the country and he painstakingly went about building the office of the presidency and its duties not only for the present but also for the future. 

He was the only United States president to win every single delegate vote for the presidency, and he did it twice. He could have run for a third term, he had all the support needed to do so, but he knew what this would do for the future of the country. By staying for another term, he would signal to others it was okay to keep power, by stepping down, he showed what was important, not power but country. And this standard of not holding office for more than two terms lasted all the way until FDR. It was so important that after FDR’s terms, congress passed a law limiting all future presidents to follow in Washington’s footsteps and limit their time in office to two terms. 

But one does not need to be president to leave a mark on the world. One does not need to be a CEO, or famous, they simply need to understand the power of how they impact others and the precedent they set for the next generation. 

As Marcus Aurelius once reminded himself:

“Everything transitory - the knower and the known.”

With the little time allotted to our lives, the kharaktēr we leave on others is what matters, it is the imprint that will last for generations to come. And from that, others will build upon it for their own generation, and the generation that follows will thus do the same.

Our lives are building blocks for the next generation. Even though time is short, our actions are anything but fleeting. 

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Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.

Until next week,

D.A. DiGerolamo