Sounds like you are similar in age to me, scaredy. within a decade i’d say.
There are days I feel like the above, but not many. I believe you’ll see things in a whole nuther light when you have grandkids running around. I’m assuming you don’t yet since your kids are just reaching college age.
We had our kids very young so we are enjoying a few grandkids now. They help me see the world through their eyes, as they discover new things…their eagerness to learn, their amazement at the strange things on this earth, their energy. It can’t help but rub off.
I’m reaching the point where I can see the apex. It’s actually not that far away. So I’ve given careful thought to how I want to spend the final years of my life, spend the money I’ve carefully collected, what I want my legacy to be. Any doctor trip I could return with the knowledge my remaining time may be measured not in decades but in years or months. What do I want to leave behind?
I’ve come up with four things.
– If I die first, I want my wife to be financially secure. If she wants to remarry that’s fine, but I don’t want her to HAVE to remarry. I’ve got this one in the bag.
– I want to leave my kids a good chunk of change. Once my wife passes, I want to have made their life a little easier. Not enough so they never have to work, but enough so that they can afford to not worry. I’m pretty much where I want to be here also.
– I want to leave a written and visual history of our life. I do a lot of genealogy, and for hundreds years past all I pretty much have are names and dates. It gives me very little insight into who these people were, what they felt, what they valued, how they lived their lives. Thank goodness for census records or I wouldn’t even have names and dates. So I want to record my life in a written autobiography. Not so much for public consumption, but to be handed down to future generations. Future generations will have it better, there will be a lot of on-line artifacts for them to draw upon. But it will tell a fractured story – I want to leave a more complete profile, from birth to (almost) death.
– I want to leave genealogical record as deep as I can get it with the artifacts available to me today. There is a lot of stuff out there – much more than I ever realized. But it is still mostly names and dates. Two exceptions are newspaper articles (mostly 1850+) and military records. Oftentimes they will give deeper glimpses into people, especially if they applied for a pension.
Note they are all family-focused goals. I figure any mark I make on the world at large will quickly be wiped out by the constants waves of advancement by the billions of others on this earth (a good thing), swept away like footsteps on a beach.
Sorry for getting long-winded, but that is what I’ve decided I want to leave behind when all is said and done.
