Legacy MattersYou all know Ben Stein, writer, actor, game show host. He's been a columnist for Entertainment online for some 7 or 8 years and today he wrote his farewell column - How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World.
It's worth quoting because too many people think that money=legacy, that money and stuff is the only thing you pass on. How we live, how we are of service to others, how we love in the end is what matters. That's what we leave behind and pay forward into the future, that's our legacy. Think of your life as star you get to shine, or not. Are you a blazing comet, a steady light, a collapsing star or a black hole?
Ben, living close to many so called "stars" writes
How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model?
Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.
A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world....
A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad...
There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive. The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery. The teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children. The kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.
Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.
Now you have my idea of a real hero.
....I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.
The Buddha says it more succinctly - Fashion your life as a garland of beautiful deeds.
Posted by Jill Fallon at February 15, 2005 12:16 AM | Permalink