Leaving a Legacy Written Down Seven Generations
We all make tracks in the sand of time based on what we do and what we leave for future generations. So let’s focus a bit more on the work that will outlast us and care a bit more for the people that will make up pieces of our life long legacies.
This week I tackled the challenging but fulfilling task of going through the decades-worth volume of old paperwork, manuals, notebooks, and files that naturally accumulates in a regular public affairs office. It was particularly interesting to track the transition from hard copy paper files squirreled away in filing cabinets to electronic storage. I certainly gained a new appreciation for cloud-based filing systems.
All told, I looked through the paperwork from three generations of public affairs officers before me and it got me thinking: how do we know what might be useful for the people who will step into our roles after we leave and what materials will just clutter up an office? I’m quite certain that no public affairs person back in 2002 when the Forest Service was just transitioning to having a consistent online presence at all could have conceptualized storing all of our required official documents and training materials online. So although I ended up filling a large recycling bin full of old manuals that are now totally available online, I’m certain that folks before me left the manuals to be ready reference materials.
It reminds me of a Native American concept I learned while attending a training led by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. They try to make decisions based on the possibility consequences of those decisions rippling over time for the next seven generations. To be it another way, if we were to follow this principle in our cities, any new developments would be considered based on their impact over roughly the next 150 years.
I can think of many strains that cities deal with today that could have been completely avoided had city planners had that longer-term view. Think about subdivisions without sufficient water rights to support them, building homes in known wildfire prone areas where no fire department could ever sufficirntly protect, or letting our urban areas turn into Anywhere, USA with urban sprawl damaging the unique character of downtowns that could act as catalysts as long-term growth.
And I wonder what pitfalls we might avoid individually if we took a similar approach with our own lives. I don’t think we can hope to live to see seven generations but at least I would think we could maybe take a decade-long view of the consequences from our actions and consider how they might impact our lives. Would we stay in the relationships we do or would we commit in a different qway to the ones that matter most to us? Would we focus a bit more on our health and well-being? Would we care a bit less about the day-to-day annoyances that we have and instead have the capacity and foresight to drill down to what matters most and spend more time in that realm?
It’s probably impossible for us to foresee what will be most important and worth holding on to and passing along to the next generation and what things should we let go of now, so that future generations don’t get bogged down sorting through the hard copy files so to speak that are now, metaphorically speaking, obsolete with cloud computing? We all make tracks in the sand of time based on what we do and what we leave for future generations. So let’s focus a bit more on the work that will outlast us and care a bit more for the people that will make up pieces of our life long legacies.