Living a Meaningful Life

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

- William James, philosopher and psychologist

Ask yourself: If I were gone tomorrow, what will I be most proud of having left behind?

That's a pretty heady question. It opens the door for so many different topics. There's the major level, that can affect a large group of people, across many states/countries. There's the half way, medium sort of level, that affects a decent number of people that you don't know directly. There's the small, sometimes impossible to see level that affects only a handful of people, all of whom know you directly. Which level do I want to aim for? What do I want to turn around in fifty years and be able to say, "I accomplished that!"

When I was in high school, our health class was given a box of sample size Teen Spirit deodorants. The tropical scent, I'm pretty sure. Anyway, it has this distinctive scent, that sort of lingers around even after the locker room's cleared out. All the girls in my class at one point or another went through a stick in high school. You couldn't get away from it. I used to read the Fear Street series when I was bored, and there was this one book that had a scene where a kid was pulling a peeping tom in the girls' locker room, when he got busted. Somehow, I associated that scene with the scent of Teen Spirit from our own locker room. To this day, if I catch a whiff of the tropical scent used so many years ago, I instantly recall that scene.

That's what I want to do. I want to write a scene so realistic, that when someone reads it, they associate it with a real life event and it forever becomes immortalized. I have no clue who RL Stein is. I had to look up his book because I'd forgotten what the series was called after so many years. But I always, always, always remember that scene. That's pretty powerful right there. I don't know if there are still Fear Street books printed, or if kids are still reading them. They may have been relegated to the bottom shelf of a dusty bookstore, never to see the light of day again. But it sticks with me. I am pretty positive I'd be perfectly okay with my books going the road of the dinosaur, as long as at some point, someone will pick it up, and go...'wow its been ages. Man I loved this book.' And I will most likely never know if I ever have that effect on someone else, but to know the possibility of that happening exists? That's enough to keep me going. That's enough to make it worth it. Now I just have to remember that.