Dear 7B,
Sometimes I have dreams of how people will remember me. These dreams are usually positive but occasionally – well, a little embarrassing.
♥”She was a very good knitter. Look, she made me this scarf.”
♥”She was funny. Well, peculiar, actually.”
♥”She helped me on my first day of school when I got hopelessly lost and ended up in the cleaner’s broom cupboard.”
Hmm, well. I know they’re not the most wonderful things to be remembered for, but they’re possibilities.
What would you like to be remembered for?
♥”That boy made a gadget that caused the i-Pad 3 (whoops, I mean the new i-Pad) to stop selling. Apple had to give him a job before he put the company out of business.”
♥”That girl became a great scientist and found a cure for breast cancer.”
♥”That boy figured out how to power Melbourne with recycled garbage from two high schools, four office blocks and an alpaca farm.”
♥”She was such a warm, kind person.”
♥”He was a wonderful father. Every night he told his children stories and they hung on his words.”
Everyone leaves some kind of legacy – and I don’t mean money. I mean an attitude of mind, a skill, an action or an achievement, hopefully one that is memorable and worthwhile, that lasts for many years and influences others.
In the context of a civilisation, a legacy means a special contribution that a civilisation leaves behind. It might include:
♦a memorable idea such as a special way of organising a society or dealing with a problem;
♦some kind of scientific knowledge;
♦an invention;
♦a monument;
♦a skill;
♦an impressive achievement in art, government, literature, etc;
♦something that later societies have admired and sought to emulate.
For instance, the ancient Sumerians are believed to have been the first to create a writing system. They pressed wedge-shaped marks into clay tablets. Many historians believe that this is what gave the Egyptians the idea of developing hieroglyphs.
Here’s a quotation from an article about the 20-year history of the internet, by Guy Rundle in The Age on Sunday 15 March, 2009:
“Five thousand years ago, the invention of writing in Mesopotamia [Sumer] separated information from presence – a few strokes of cuneiform on a clay tablet established that meaning, intent, communication could be separated and transmitted without a person there to present it.
“From this event flows every modern institution of the state…”
That’s some legacy!
The ancient Egyptians had many achievements over the course of their long history. Their beautiful tomb paintings, for example, show us all about their lives on the Nile River. They drew figures in a way that changed little over the years. Can you think of other great and inspiring achievements that others might have built upon?