Prove It

“Often a very old man has no proof of his long life other than his old age.” - Seneca

Prove it. Prove the existence of this life you’ve had. Perhaps not yet ninety years, but soon.

What have you built? What rooms and structures and pathways and stairs? Where do they lead?

What have you grown? A movement, a business, a bank account, a human? Or maybe, awareness, a cucumber, moonflowers?

What have you painted? What colors have you put across a page, what rocks have you shaped into form? Where have you offered a moment of pause, a chance to stop and think of beauty? And when did you stop and gasp at beauty? What did you do with what you’d seen?

What of excellence? What skills did you hone? Where did you spirit lift? Did you do the thing you knew you must? The one that felt treacherous, daunting, fraught? The one that even after weighing the odds and knowing the limits of your skill, you felt you must do anyways? Did you take a swing? 

Where did you swing and miss? What have you done with your strikeouts? Did they soften you or harden you? Did you dig in the toe of your cleat and step into the batter’s box again?

Where are your words? The hard won wisdom of your many years — where is it? Buried in the hearts of those you love, nestled in the minds of those who listened and read and sought?

What of your body? Did you come to know it’s potential? Did you ever anticipate where it would take you? The movements that were possible? The spaces it would occupy? And once in these spaces and places you never imagined occupying, did you inhabit them well?

And what of the people you walked with? Who bore witness? Were you seen? By who? Who did you see? Were you kind? Were you present? Were you there? What was the root system of your days? 

What does legacy look like? Feel like? Looking back across the cityscape of your life — its structures and constituency and culture and environment — what will you say? What will be the proof of your time here?

Certainly more than a tally of years.