Legacies of the Heart: The Flip Side of Purpose
@ 2009 Margaret L. Newhouse, Ph.D.

Editor's note: Meg Newhouse is a nationally known pioneer in Third-Age LifeCrafting and an experienced group facilitator, teacher, coach, and program designer. As a catalyst for living with passion, purpose and grace after 50, she gives talks and workshops, writes, and consults to organizations, helping people create vital, fulfilling later lives that express who they are and how they want to contribute. She is currently working on a book on purposeful legacy. The founder of the Life Planning Network, she is the co-author of Life Planning for the Third Age: A Design Guide and Toolkit. Meg holds a BA from Wellesley College, MAT from Harvard University, and PhD in political science from UCLA. She is an avid learner/seeker on many fronts, a serious amateur flutist, and devoted friend, family member and grandmother.

Among the things that make the “second journey" something to anticipate rather than dread are the developmental "tasks" or "urges" that we now understand come with the territory. Most salient among these catalysts to continued growth are finding purpose and leaving a legacy. My own recent absorption in the topic of legacy has made me think more about its relationship to purpose. I believe they are separate but overlapping, or perhaps flip sides of the same coin. They nourish and reinforce each other. Our most authentic and powerful legacies come from living "on purpose," that is, giving our unique gifts, guided by our core essence. These gifts of ourselves, both tangible and intangible, the imprint of our lives that reflect our purpose, will necessarily be legacies of the heart. For this and other reasons, I advocate clarifying our purpose and being intentional about our legacies early in our second journey, as we harvest and pass on our inner wealth while there is still time to reap the many rewards.

Purpose and Legacy “Defined”

Both purpose and legacy are huge, multifaceted subjects. Since this entire journal is devoted to purpose, I offer here only a rudimentary working definition that shapes my understanding of the relationship between purpose and legacy. I’m using purpose in the sense of “life purpose” or “calling” —our unique combination of core values, gifts, passions, and essence (Soul/Higher Self) that, when recognized and offered in service, give our lives meaning, wholeness, and joy.

Despite its narrow, concrete primary dictionary definition, namely, “a gift or bequest of property,” to me legacy is:

• as broad as the imprint of one’s life that lasts at least into the next generation and as specific as a single piece of property (e.g., a family heirloom) willed to a survivor;

• as mighty as a religious or scientific paradigm shift or great artistic output and as mundane as a single family recipe passed down the generations;

• as public as an architectural monument and as private as a letter written to your children or grandchildren;

• as tangible as a bank check and as intangible as a seemingly casual word of advice;

• as life-enhancing as a lifesaving Heimlich maneuver and as life-denying as the Holocaust.

In navigating this thicket I have found a few distinctions particularly helpful:

1. Macro/Micro: Macro refers to the level of societies and cultures, the traditions, values, and world views we inherit from our cultures, typically unconsciously and unquestioningly. It also includes legacies left that change cultural mores, esthetics, knowledge, religions, paradigms, etc., occasionally by a truly great individual and, commonly, by the cumulative small acts of thousands of individuals over time. In contrast, micro refers to the individual or family and is the focus of this essay.

2. Intentional/unintentional: My assumption is that most of us are relatively unintentional about our legacies until late in life, if then. That is, we don’t think in terms of what we are leaving and want to leave behind. I argue here for intentionality earlier rather than later.

3. Heart/Soul-based/Ego-based: By the former, I mean legacies stemming from our life-purpose, essence/Soul, which I assume reflect higher-order values such as love, compassion, generosity, tolerance. Ego may well be involved, but only in the service of these values. Legacies of the heart are true gifts, without strings or expectations. In contrast, Ego-based legacies reflect egoic values and instincts such as fear, competition, lack, exclusion, control. I hypothesize that the more aware and intentional we are, the more we will want and try to leave “legacies of the heart.”

4. Tangible/Intangible: Tangible legacies include monetary and other material things, such as real estate, family heirlooms, memoirs, photos, and recipes; more public buildings (financed, designed, built); organizations founded, funded, or shaped; and artistic creations of all genres. Intangible legacies range from the beliefs, world view, values, life lessons, accrued wisdom we transmit, to the love we model and the forms in which we do or don’t communicate it, to the imprint of our core essence and our deepest values to benefit those we love and to improve the world. Ideally, tangible legacies express and symbolize intangible ones.

It is worth noting that on their deathbeds, most people want to know only three things: 1) Have I given and received love? 2) Did I live my life or someone else’s? Do I feel complete? 3) Have I left the world a little better than I found it?¹

Legacies Received

Most people, when they start to think about legacies they have received think first of intangible legacies. For example, 80–90% of participants in workshops and legacy discussion groups I’ve led respond to an open-ended request to “Think of a legacy—any way you want to think of it—that you’ve received from someone who cared about you,” by mentioning intangible legacies, such as:

• a social justice ethic from one or both parents (or grandparents)—or thrift ethic, work ethic, or (name the value).

• a scientist father’s essential curiosity, wonder, amazement, and optimism that now shapes his daughter’s work of integrating science and spirituality.

• support and life-changing advice from a mentor teacher, in one case, receiving a B instead of the expected A in a graduate counseling course, with the comment: “You think you know more about other people’s lives than they do.”

• watching a brother transform himself in his last year of life, redefining success, living fully, and creating an end-of life ritual of forgiveness and gratitude.

• a 100-year-old grandmother’s question “When are you going to finish your studies?” that caused her granddaughter to get a valued Ph.D. in mid-life.

Some of these legacies were negative or at best mixed:

• Seeing a father die relatively young unfulfilled in his work, which sent his daughter the message: “If you don’t do what you want to do, it will kill you.”

• A tradition of martyrdom from a woman’s maternal Italian side, which it has become part of her life work to interrupt

• Family feuding or squabbling over property “unfairly” bequeathed

• Family secrets causing lasting shame

Even when material legacies pop up first in this workshop exercise, they almost always reflect the values, beliefs, or other intangible emotional or spiritual gifts of the giver. For example:

• a family vacation home that represented the strong value placed on family

• family recipes and food traditions that recall broader family values and experiences around the dinner table

• In my own case, four material legacies from my revered grandfather that profoundly shaped my life: 1) a savings bond given at my birth that paid most of my college tuition, 2) a loan when I was 16 that allowed me to buy an excellent second-hand flute, 3) his autobiography, written shortly before his death, a tangible record of his values, wisdom, and life story, and 4) a typed collection of about 100 of his favorite poems, most of which he knew by heart.

Leaving Legacies

It is much easier to recall and ponder legacies we have received than it is to contemplate the legacies we are leaving. For one thing, our hyper-busy lives discourage being conscious about our legacies. For another, we can be discouraged by feeling inadequate (“I’m not leaving anything worthwhile behind”) or overly humble (“I shouldn’t feel proud of this thing I did”) or overwhelmed at the perceived gap between what Frederick Buechner called “the world’s deep hunger” and our own capacities. Moreover, being intentional about our legacies requires us to confront our mortality and the meaning of our life, which this culture discourages.

And yet, as we age and begin inexorably to confront our own mortality, many of us begin to think and care more about the meaning of our lives, our contributions, and the legacy we want to leave behind for those we love as well as for generations to come. We want to bequeath our inner wealth and the question becomes: How do we want to do that beyond what we have already inevitably left behind simply by living and working in the world, with more or less awareness?

What I’m seeing is a widespread desire to leave material “legacies of the heart,” concrete evidence of our passions, purpose, and learning from life. I see it in the importance discussion group members come to place on material (mostly non-monetary) inheritances or keepsakes from loved forbearers. I infer it from the exploding interest in memoir/life story writing or scrapbooking as evidenced by numerous books and courses. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi captures this idea memorably: “Are you ‘saved’?” he asks. "I don't mean it in a theological sense but in a computer sense. Are you saved? Have you downloaded your life experience for coming generations? Have you started doing your legacy work?”₂

It is not uncommon for purpose-based legacies to grow out of the dying process. For example, lung cancer struck a 40-year-old nonsmoking friend of mine who was a lawyer specializing in health care. As it advanced to a terminal stage, he wrote an influential article, published in the July 16, 1995, Boston Globe Magazine, on the importance of compassionate caregiving within the entire medical community. This led to his planning with family and close friends to found the now thriving Kenneth B. Schwartz Center, whose mission is “to support and advance compassionate health care…in a way that provides hope to the patient, support to caregivers and sustenance to the healing process.” More recently, Randy Pautscher, facing a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, gave a “Last Lecture” at Carnegie Mellon University (created mainly for his young children), which spread through the media—news, web, Oprah and, finally, Jeffrey Zaslow’s book by the same name, leaving an unexpectedly broad and powerful legacy.

Obviously, these are legacies of unusual scope, and there are many more examples of “small” private legacies that are inspired by the immediacy of death, including the example of a brother’s dying ritual mentioned above. While we are blessed with these inspired deathbed legacies, how many people never leave any legacies because they put it off until it is too late? And how might our families and communities and even the world benefit from our leaving them sooner rather than later?

Examples abound. A friend of mine, who was widowed with three very young children and few financial resources, 15 years later created The Wildflower Camp Foundation, which enables children who have suffered the loss of a parent to attend summer camps. This legacy grew out of her loss and the healing role such camps played for her and her children through the generosity of several camp directors who provided scholarships to them.

For the past three years, the small but influential non-profit Civic Ventures has annually awarded Purpose Prizes (money and recognition) to passionate social entrepreneurs over 60 who are taking on society’s biggest challenges, creating new programs, and making lasting change. One of the 2008 winners was Catalino Tapia, an immigrant gardener who raises money from other gardeners, his clients, and local businesses to fund scholarships for Latino students dreaming of college. Such stories are inspiring partly because many of us could do something similar, assuming we possessed the requisite passion and purpose around a cause.

BUT we don’t have to be a social entrepreneur, and it doesn’t have to be a public or large offering. A colleague of mine, having taken good care of various family treasures (furniture, pictures, jewelry, silver, etc.), has gradually over time written short notes about the origin, family stories, and importance of individual items and attached them to the items. To her, these messages are more important to hand down than the actual items, and she has the current reward of a 9-year-old granddaughter’s rapt attention.

On a personal note, I have embarked on a legacy letter-writing project, akin to an “ethical will,” which involves writing letters over time to my family (husband, children, grandchildren, and siblings)—some individual letters of appreciation, some common letters laying out my beliefs, values, life lessons, wishes for end-of-life care and after-death rituals. I imagine that this project will evolve into some memoir or family/life story pieces. It is challenging to carve out the time, to write from the heart (as opposed to ego), to face the possibility that the recipients will react with indifference or even alienation to my bared soul, and to trust in whatever impact there may be. But the rewards have been worth it:

• my own growth and learning—clarifying values, purpose; rediscovering meaning, threads and patterns, unfinished business;

• a few ensuing “real” conversations with my family;

• a certain satisfaction in offering my vulnerable, evolving core self in the service of an unknown legacy to my children, grandchildren, and perhaps beyond. Perhaps this then becomes part of my own life purpose.

In summary, I believe most of us are best served if we reflect on and act intentionally to leave our legacies throughout rather than at the end of our second journey. And that is simpler, though not necessarily easier, than we think. We simply need to discover or clarify our life purpose—our deepest values, longings, “woundings,” gifts, passions, essence—because when we are living and acting with awareness from our purpose, we will have a powerful, positive impact on the people in our lives and a clearer idea what we want to bequeath to them and future generations. The authenticity and purity of intent is the key factor, not the magnitude of the actual legacy. What matters most is that it comes as a gift from the heart, without strings and expectations, but with love and a desire to self-express, serve, and make a positive difference. These legacies will be received if, when, and how according to the readiness of the recipients, and they will be passed on in ripples impossible to imagine.

Indeed, if enough people were to consciously leave such legacies of the heart, we could incrementally transform the culture and preserve the planet for future generations. And who is riper to leave such a legacy than second-journeyers?
 

Notes

          ¹           From Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s work with the dying, as passed on by Richard Leider.

         ²           Quoted in Harry R. (Rick) Moody’s Human Values in Aging Newsletter, May 1, 2009.