Most obituaries are about ordinary people who did ordinary things with extraordinary loyalty.
STILLNESS
WHAT THIS MEANS
Hardly anybody gets summed up by achievements at the end, because achievements are not what the people left behind were watching. What gets written down is duration: forty years at one job, every Sunday without fail, taking care of somebody for a long time with no audience anywhere. Steadiness across years turns out to be the rare material.
No remarkable plan is needed to end up there. Choose something or somebody and be reliable for a long time. That is the whole formula, and all the difficulty sits in the years.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
What ordinary thing do you do with unusual faithfulness?
MORE IN TIME, MORTALITY & LEGACY
- There was a final time you all played outside together until the streetlights came on. Nobody announced it.
- Some chapters are short and some are long, but none of them get to be skipped. Read yours all the way through.
- Kindness compounds like interest. A little every day, and years later people can’t remember a version of you without it.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.