How will I be remembered? Embodying Your Legacy Today: An Homage to Bill Walton
How will I be remembered? Embodying your legacy today.
An homage to Mr. Bill Walton, November 5, 1952 – May 27, 2024.
On May 27, 2024, I woke to my Facebook feed flooded with posts mourning the loss of Bill Walton, ‘the luckiest guy in the world’ who had just passed away at the age of 71 after battling cancer. From news sources to sports pages to music pages... from ‘famous’ people who knew him personally to individuals who considered themselves ‘lucky’ enough to have had the opportunity to even snap a photo with him. Everyone, every group was mourning Bill. I was struck at how the posts and stories crossed many of the groups and pages I follow and weren’t limited to one interest. People of all walks were openly mourning the loss of a colleague, a broadcaster, a supporter, a fan, an icon, a friend. The evening news even had a clip on Bill’s life, noting his love for basketball and his favorite band – The Grateful Dead – a love I share deeply with Bill. Pictures in post after post, regardless of source, invariably showed a man in one of his many tie-dye t-shirts, beaming one of the most genuine and infectious smiles I have ever seen. Whether sitting courtside as a basketball broadcaster or towering over crowds at Grateful Dead concerts with arms raised in praise and gratitude, Bill always had that smile. Bill’s infectious energy radiated out of him. Bill himself was an energy, a whole vibe. From the many posts, comments, and articles I read, it became crystal-clear that Bill had effortlessly impacted many people in a positive way, and he was not someone that would soon be forgotten.
That night after being inundated with this collective grief, I tossed and turned and found myself repeatedly thinking of Bill and his smile. Despite me not knowing of Bill prior to his passing, his legacy immediately became apparent to me without me even reflecting on the concept of legacies. A radiant vibe, energy, and message just continuously exploded out of the pictures and stories: Be unabashedly yourself. Be kind. Smile so big it invites the entire room in! What a fantastic legacy to leave, an indelible memory and influence to make someone want to be better than they are now. To bring joy to others just by existing alongside them. To make even the strangest of strangers want to stop and shake your hand.
As I continued to be engulfed in this oddly heavy murkiness of his positive energy, his infectious smile, it eventually led me to a place of reflection. What is my own legacy? How do I want to be remembered? And more so - what message do I hope permeates beyond my passing? What indelible mark do I hope to leave? This made me face myself in the present. It also made me face my own mortality. And for those reasons, I find that many people unintentionally avoid these questions as it reminds us of this, of our own, inevitable mortality. But one way we can have some peace over the inevitable is to have the comfort of knowing what we left behind is intentional and genuine.
Determining Our Own Legacy
What do you want your legacy to be is a question I have invariably heard in many different conferences throughout my life. Sometimes asking what this looks like financially – how do you want to ensure your children/beneficiaries/spouses are taken care of. Many other times it’s how we want to be remembered as an individual, as a being. It is a great question, a thought-provoking prompt as we navigate how we want to show up in the world. Most of the time however it’s just one question among many and gets buried 6 feet under other questions that we believe may be easier to dig in to. But Bill’s passing has given me pause. Who I want to be remembered as, the legacy I hope to leave, requires more than just a quick meander-through on my way to what I think are the deeper insights. Who we want to be remembered as, the energy we leave in this world – that’s some meaningful ‘stuff’ there, and worthy of a conversation, whether with ourselves or with others.
As I begin to sift through my own thoughts, I am finding myself asking - what can I learn from Bill’s legacy? Are there any pieces of what he left behind that feel right, that feel like a part of me that I too want to share? As I reflect on my own legacy, where am I immediately drawn? What words, emotions, sensations am I drawn to? What immediately resonates with me? What feels incoherent in this recognition? What in my body or being doesn’t jive with what’s showing up for me here? Where am I feeling any resistance to this exercise – emotionally or physically? What’s going on there? In these explorations we have room to play around. While we must be genuine in who we currently believe we are, that doesn’t foreclose the chance to dig deeper into who we are to truly get at what we want to leave behind. Being out of our comfort zone doesn’t mean we aren’t being true to ourselves; it means there’s some exploring to do there.
Embodying your legacy today
In doing my own discovering, I find that the internal dialogue goes quickly from the question of how I want my legacy to live on, to adding to the equation ‘how am I showing up in the world now’. When we do this shift in time, taking away the illusion of a future time within which to become someone or something better, the question gains its true weight. We aren’t guaranteed a tomorrow, so if I were to leave today, what would my legacy be, and is it aligned with what I would want it to be? If I am unsure what I would want it to be, it becomes nearly impossible to determine any level of success by how I measure up to that standard today. Thus it is essential to have some self-created standard to measure ourselves against.
This initial step of figuring out who we want to be seems like a given. But most of us forsake this step and immediately start with the awareness of things feeling out of whack or out of alignment and try to fix it immediately (or sometimes just get stuck in it). Instead of taking a step back and seeing what isn’t measuring up where, we look for a quick fix, a quick change to alleviate the discomfort of things not being how we want. In this instance, noting that if we were to pass today, we don’t like the legacy we think may be left behind and immediately taking actions that we think could improve that legacy. But for enduring change, we must really understand and explore what we want this legacy to look like, so we are able to embody it and embrace it, so we are able to begin to become it.
Even after we have this defined look of what we want our legacy to look like, life likes to get in the way. Many times, it feels like its incompatible to even attempt to embody this envisioned greatness while contending with the difficulties of our day to day lives. It’s easy to get lost in the mundane, get bogged down in the monotony, become overwhelmed, and lose sight of being intentional and genuine. But for us to really embody this legacy we hope to leave, we need to continuously check in with ourselves and do a quick measure against that standard we’ve set.
How Others View Us – Disowning Others’ Assessments
One aspect of our legacy we can’t control is how others see us. Try as we may to change others’ thoughts on us, people sometimes are so stuck in their own ways of thinking that they can’t or won’t see changes in others. We may shift and show up differently and embody the legacy we want to leave, and it may go unseen by certain people in our lives. There is little frustration like bettering yourself only to not be seen by others. It makes us question - what’s the purpose, why am I even trying? With a legacy, we may even think – the whole purpose here is to leave something of me behind, and if they can’t even see it, what’s the point? I’d counter this – it’s just as important to live your legacy so it may live on past you, as it is to live your legacy now. Our legacy is as a guiding light, a principle that permeates in us and wants to be shared. If we don’t discover it, we don’t share it, we aren’t just short-changing the world, but we are doing ourselves a major disservice in our own path to a better life.
The Journey Continues…
While I continue to navigate through the many possibilities of my own legacy, I am grateful for Bill. His legacy made me question my own and made me want to be better and leave the world a better place. As I question how joy, excitement, humility, and humor all play into what I want to leave behind, I will continue to wear Bill’s legacy, whether it be in one of my favorite tie-dye t-shirts, or with a big, infectious smile. And while I won’t always think of Bill when I do this, I don’t need to. I have embodied what I, and maybe he, intended – more joy and kindness.
· Throughout this post I have referred to Bill Walton as “Bill” as it was difficult to walk away from all the accounts of him and not consider him a friend. I meant no disrespect by referring to him by first name only.
· If working with a coach to explore your legacy speaks to you, feel free to reach out. I love to help others find their light and to help it shine through.