What Will They Whisper About You?
As you go about your days, living the one life that’s been given you, remember this —
Film is rolling and it will be misfiled in the vast damp basement of history with miles and miles of others. Video will likely be lost and audio quality will be poor, at best. But a diligent, intrepid, careful and curious ancestor may find it, far in the distant future, and it may fill in some blanks in her story, it may teach her something valuable about herself. Or perhaps an unrelated stranger wandering in the dusty tombs of history will unearth some piece of you that speaks to him, a remnant of your brilliance or your eccentricities that will move him to greater things.
You could end up filed carefully, with enhanced audio/visual attachments in that tiny bright warm room tended by busy scholars, but it’s unlikely. The selection committee is shadowy and possibly deranged. You’ll find Shakespeare and Ghandi, Ella Fitzgerald and Jonas Salk in that special room. Elizabeth, Socrates, Julia, Malcolm and Zora. But they will sit jumbled on shelves, rubbing elbows with Tiny Tim and Kim Kardashian, Rin Tin Tin and Beau Brummell. Hitler, Stalin, Mao. The brilliant and the ridiculous, the sacred and the profane, the truly terrifying — you’ll find examples of all the mess of humanity in that room. Lined up and labeled, history’s little soldiers. You could end up there, you never know.
So here’s what you do.
While you have the stage, stand tall and proud in the center of your circle of light and give it hell. Spill whatever glory you have all over the place, send it all the way to the back of the universe. Your best béarnaise, the clutch of tended roses, the scribbled sonnet, the painted nails and frosted tips. Carefully, tenderly mold your best — the act of creation will save us all. Surgeons and mothers, plumbers and princes, whatever you are, whatever you do, burnish it bright and send it into the wild beyond. Walk your path with style, wear it well and proud. Fling it into the air, into the future — you can’t know where it will land. It’s not for you to know.
You are a gift to that future, you will endure somehow, for someone, somewhere. My Mohegan great-great-grandmother worked beads with her 19th century hands somewhere in the northeast. I know nothing more of her, but I have some of her beadwork and the family still ghost whispers about her. We whisper, too, about great-great granddaddy Bean’s natty, selfish ways and great-uncle Gene’s magic with all the growing things. The recipes passed down for generations, the horse thief tales, the lost babies and the infidelities, the wild, raucous, sad stories of our people.
What will the ghost whisperers say about you, what will the future see, say, touch, taste of you? Better get to work and make something — say something, sing something, think something, DO something — worth whispering about. Build cities, break bread. Leave prints. One paragraph painting your morning, one mitten, a song, a card with instructions for your cookie, your custard, your cocktail. A letter filled with glee or heartbreak or just observation. One worn stone in a pocket, the way you push your curl behind your ear, a tale of mischief. One flat strand of storytelling beads.
Don’t disappoint the archivists of the future, put some gems in the source material. Raise their eyebrows or their blood pressure or their ire or their capacity for compassion, for humanity. Teach them something. Leave them something.
The future needs you.
