JustAdvice

We were sip­ping cof­fee in Starbuck’s when I noticed “Luis” etched into the sur­face of our table.  Luis no doubt believed he was mak­ing a mean­ing­ful state­ment, but I sus­pect he didn’t think it through. 

Besides the mark in the table, Luis left a more telling impres­sion.  He left evi­dence of some­one who has no respect for other people’s prop­erty and who doesn’t ana­lyze his own behav­ior.  Had he done so, he might have real­ized such a tem­po­ral mark would, in the long run, mean noth­ing.  It is not a pos­i­tive legacy to will­fully dam­age some­thing, and leav­ing one’s name on an object that will, within a rel­a­tively short period of time, either be refin­ished or dis­carded as junk, does not impart immortality.      

As far as I’m con­cerned, graf­fiti is the human equiv­a­lent of dogs mark­ing tires and fire hydrants.  For ani­mals, it is a use­ful act based on instinct.  For peo­ple, it’s sense­less, waste­ful and demean­ing.  Besides the inap­pro­pri­ate­ness of this par­tic­u­lar act, how­ever, I was struck by some­thing else with regard to the gen­eral human need to be noticed and remem­bered. Luis was telling the World that he existed, that he had been there, and that he mat­tered.   I agree.  He was there and he does mat­ter.  Still, it was a futile act and a ridicu­lous way to seek noto­ri­ety.  Besides, there are thou­sands of peo­ple named Luis out there, so his crudely carved let­ters could refer to any of them.  That fact alone brought him full cir­cle, back to anonymity.

Most of us believe the world should be bet­ter, not worse, because we spent time in it.  Accom­plish­ing that, how­ever, is some­thing else.  One thing is cer­tain; it doesn’t come from leav­ing our monikers in pub­lic places.  In fact, a decent legacy is much more sub­tle and com­plex than that.  It takes years of real effort that yield last­ing, altru­is­tic results.  Scrawl­ing one’s name on a handy sur­face, for oth­ers to read and turn up their noses in dis­gust, doesn’t yield much, in the end.  It cer­tainly doesn’t improve anyone’s life, includ­ing that of the van­dal himself.

At the risk of sound­ing hokey, a decent legacy con­sists of leav­ing indeli­ble marks on people’s hearts, not on their prop­erty.  Such a mark is forged by doing what is right, even when it is dif­fi­cult, and not sim­ply to feed one’s ego.  It is the result of sac­ri­fice, hard work and a will­ing­ness to put other peo­ple first.  A legacy worth hav­ing comes from years of invest­ment.  It is not a result of the few min­utes it takes to sur­rep­ti­tiously carve one’s first name into a small table in a very busy cof­fee house.