What Survives Us

In life, nothing is more constant than change. Things are going to change around here as well, because the time has come for me to face the next big chapter of my life.

For the next two years, I will be serving as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Hong Kong.This means I won't be around to write new posts for a while, but rest assured I'll have some good ones cooked up for June 2019. Start your countdown timers.

Although I won't be personally curating this dear blog of mine until I return home, I may occasionally write posts from Hong Kong and have them posted for me for you readers back home. While I will be quite busy and cannot really promise any degree of consistency, I'll try to drop some breadcrumbs to fill the gap between now and 2019.

Now, as for what I really want to talk about today, I'll tell you I got some inspiration from the obituaries in the newspaper. It sounds a little depressing, but I promise that's not the direction this post will go. I noticed that at the end of an obituary, it is commonly stated that the deceased "is survived by" his or her relatives. This phrasing made me think, and although in a literal sense it means nothing more than the fact that the living relatives are indeed still alive, I think it implies something more. It means that the deceased lives on, or in a sense "survives," through those left behind.

I could go a lot of different ways with that notion, but I'll stick to the one that speaks the most to me (I'm selfish like that). The people we leave behind act as an extension of us not necessarily by blood relation, but by the stories we leave them with. We survive by being remembered. Some are remembered for good reasons, others bad, and a tragic few are not remembered at all. I say this not out of a lust for fame or a desire to be remembered, but as a critique of my own "survivability," so to speak.

Each of us is the protagonist of our own story. I really don't think it's my place to judge whether my story deserves to be known far and wide, but I've come to realize that I want it to be something I would enjoy hearing. If I were a stranger picking up a book about some dude named Will, would it put me to sleep? I should hope not. In a perfect world, my story would be something I would find interesting, or perhaps even thrilling. Whether this is the case is determined by the small choices I make along the way.

The idea isn't too complicated, but to me it hits home. If we are the subject of our own story, why not do everything we can to make that story mind-blowingly awesome? Take a chance now and then, walk the road less traveled, as my pal Robert Frost would say. Make a story that will survive past you. I'm taking a step into my next great adventure, and I hope you can find yours, too.

Carthago delenda est!