Between Christmas and January 1st, I spent time contemplating what I wanted to let go and what I wanted to bring forward into the new year.

I decided to stop doing business with companies that didn’t listen to me and cut back on TV watching time.

Moving forward, I was clear about putting in more effort to make in-person social time happen (I had a lot of fun on New Year’s Eve playing Left, Right and Center at a friend’s house). I also wanted to be quicker to forgive myself, and, of course, to drink more water.

The reflection time was less about crafting goals or resolutions for the coming year than about clarifying my values.

It seems that most sound decisions are made in the moment, like deciding to pursue something when an opportunity comes up or when inspired by someone else’s actions or new information. I’ve come to think that resolutions that are created out of the flow of life don’t hold much promise.

I signed up for a four-week storytelling workshop, not to enhance my resume, but to increase my chances of hanging out with people who were likely to have similar values. I want to spend time with people who believe in the significance of their own experiences and want to bear witness to the narratives of other humans doing their best without an owner’s manual for their lives.

If my first sixty plus years on earth has taught me anything, it’s this. Everybody has to develop their own manual.

This period of pondering got me thinking about the idea of legacy; the idea of leaving behind something of value.

The term “legacy” commonly refers to a gift of money or property bestowed upon a death, transacted in conjunction with a will, but there are non-monetary meanings for the term.

A broader definition, courtesy of Webster’s online dictionary, ”something transmitted or received from an ancestor or predecessor from the past” takes into account the possibility of inheriting pain and suffering as well as a country estate.

And the term has taken on new, controversial meanings. The children of alumni at some elite colleges often enjoy admitting privileges over academically superior but less connected candidates almost like part of their inheritance. Companies, especially in tech, bemoan “legacy costs,” the expenses involved in supporting older products, which might work fine for many customers but don’t support their current business model.

People from diverse nationalities and professions seem to be concerned about their legacy as a point of pride. A father might choose to name his first-born son after him or donate money to a clinic to have a new wing named after him.

They want something of them to live forever.

I don’t have children. Maybe I would look at legacies differently if I did, but it seems that the only thing that lives forever is love.

It’s not about attaching a name to something or even the specifics of how a mentor, a seasoned musician or baseball legend might share tricks on how he spanned a full octave of piano keys or gripped a curveball.

When I was in Spain, in Santiago de Compostela, the culmination of the Camino pilgrimage routes, where history says the bones of St James were discovered, I visited a museum dedicated to pilgrims and pilgrimages.

There, I saw a backpack in a glass case. Supposedly, during the pandemic, when travel, even spiritual sojourns, were very limited due to public health precautions, pilgrims were hard-pressed to trek all the way from southern France to the cathedral in Santiago.

A group of pilgrims couldn’t make the whole journey together, so they sent one backpack that different people carried for a portion of the trip. The backpack made the whole journey, not individuals, acquiring and displaying nautilus shells and yellow arrows from places along the way, symbolizing being on “the path.”

That’s what I think a legacy is. It’s not about naming something after you or gifting a relative or neighborhood with money. It’s not about any one person living forever. It’s about what a person loves living beyond their time on earth.

Knowing that your legacy is not about future generations remembering your name as much as it is about others caring about what you care about is no small thing.