Surrounded by Life
Last week I hiked the Wildflower Loop Trail at the Brecksville Reservation. The trail starts at the Harriet Keeler Memorial, pictured below.
Harriet Keeler was an author, teacher, and superintendent in the Cleveland area when women were expected to be behind a kitchen apron instead of a desk. She wrote over ten books on multiple subjects, and her book titled Our Native Trees and How to Identify Them is considered culturally essential and made widely available.
The plants and trees surrounding her memorial are the same wildlife Keeler wrote about, serving as a living testament to her legacy.
Harriet lived a life worth remembering, enough to the point I'm writing about her. But as Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote two thousand years ago in his Meditations:
“People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn. Until their memory, passed from one to another like a candle flame, gutters and goes out.”
Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and one of the most widely recognized authors of all time, wrote:
" . . . there are two inevitable conditions of life, confronting all of us, which destroy its whole meaning; (1) death, which may at any moment pounce upon each of us; and (2) the transitoriness of all our works, which so soon pass away and leave no trace. Whatever we may do—found companies, build palaces and monuments, write songs and poems—it is all not for long time. Soon it passes away, leaving no trace."
And before Tolstoy, Benjamin Franklin taught us that death and taxes are the only two guarantees in life. That's capital T - Truth. And with our short lives, we have a few options to move forward with:
Option 1: We can opt out of life at any moment, but since you've read this far, I can tell you haven't taken this path.
Option 2: We can start living the "I'm here for a good time, not a long time" life, licking the honey and taking the sweet things in life for ourselves when we can.
Option 3: We can invest in the life surrounding us and its source that connects all things. This means loving one another.
There are whole books written on love, but I define it as M. Scott Peck does in The Road Less Chosen, where love is the effortful work towards the mutual spiritual growth between one another.
Opting out of life takes us out of the game. Licking the honey stops when our lives do. And loving one another takes work and sacrifice but goes beyond ourselves and connects with the life that surrounds us, through us.
The best option for me is love. My life will end. And choosing to invest and contribute to the life that will extend past me seems the most reasonable, logical, and productive use of a life I didn't decide to enter into but continue to live.