The same lullaby can outlive every person who first sang it.

A few bars of a tune can move through a family for a century. Nobody preserves it deliberately, nobody writes it down, and yet it passes from a person to a child to that child’s child, long after everyone who first sang it has died. The song is a thing they made without meaning to make anything, and it turns out to be more durable than most of what they owned. Continuity often lives in what is too small to be inventoried.

Think about what has reached you that way, a phrase, a tune, a way of doing something in the kitchen. Ask where it came from while there is still someone to ask. And if you have small people around you, notice that you are handing over more than you are choosing to.