You’ll catch yourself saying something your grandma used to say. That’s legacy: not a statue, a sentence.

Legacy turns out to be small and verbal. A phrase your grandmother used shows up in your own mouth thirty years later, usually when you are tired or comforting somebody, and you hear her in it before you hear yourself. That is how most of a person travels forward: not in monuments or money, but in habits of speech and small ways of handling a bad day.

Listen for one phrase you inherited this week and notice who you got it from. Then think about what the younger kids around you are picking up from you, because they are already copying something. Make it a sentence worth saying twice.