Leaving a mark

I'm 71 today, so naturally I'm thinking about mortality.  And it occurred to me that if I found out today I have a terminal illness (which all of us have, and it's called life), my first thought would be - well, my first thought would no doubt be "I'm going to die?!  Oh no!  How do I survive this?"  My second thought would be how to take care of Sweet Hubby as he goes through the pain of losing his wife, his heart, his biggest fan.  But after that, I think I would start wondering how I can make my life and death meaningful, how I might leave some kind of mark in the world.

Since I'm a writer, of course, my first impulse might be to blog or write a play about the process of dying.  But there are already so many blogs, books, TED talks, poems, memoirs, etc on that subject, written by much better writers than I.  I want to leave a mark and I don't think my writing is going to be the vehicle for that.  So what might?  How can someone who has turned out to be rather ordinary make her life meaningful beyond the success of her own small personal world?

I have several ideas about that, and all of them scare me, because they would require me to be bigger than I am.  I wonder if being scared is a prerequisite for leaving a mark?  I think it is.  I think the people who have left the biggest marks have done it by facing deep, bone-chilling fear.  Violent people respond to that fear by putting on armor and building weapons; the non-violent ones by facing it and staring it down.  I mean, how much courage did Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have to have to speak about civil rights in the Jim Crow South?  He knew he was going to be assassinated.  He had to know, because he knew that They knew that assassination was the only way to shut him up.

I'm getting a bit beyond myself here.  I don't aspire to be another MLK, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, Harriet Tubman, someone on that level.  My ambitions are several tiers less grand than that.  I want my mark to come from having left people somehow better off, the world a better, less angry place.  I don't need to be remembered, but I do want my presence to have been felt, felt the way sunshine is felt, as something warm and healing and nurturing.  So how to do that?

I can think of some simple ways to spread that warmth.  What if I did a random act of kindness every day?  Or wrote letters of appreciation to someone every day?  Or smiled at every single person I encountered for the rest of my life?  These all seem simple, small commitments, but it's the "every day" and "for the rest of my life" that I find intimidating.  But then, I'm looking at this from the perspective of someone who does not have a terminal disease and expects to live for another 25 years or so. 

In all this musing, what is revealed to me is that I already know how to make the world a better place, but there isn't a lot of urgency about it for me, so I don't do these simple things I could be doing.  I play small.  If I really want to leave a mark, why in my imaginings am I waiting for a death sentence to prompt me into action?  What could I be doing now, right now, this minute?

I want you to know, whomever you are who is taking a moment to read my ramblings, that I appreciate you so much.  I consider your presence here an act of great generosity.  I know you are here for no other reason than that you care about me, and that just knocks me out.  So here is my promise: I will look every day for some way I can be kind; some way I can help someone, stranger or friend; some way to bring some sunshine into the world.  Especially when I'm scared or cranky or tired or down-hearted.  So there.