How to Live Forever

by Johnny B. Truant

You are told that you must earn so that you can spend, and you must spend so that you can have some small thing to do that you enjoy. You are told that you can do that thing you enjoy for a while, but then you need to go back and earn so that you can spend. So that you can do that thing you enjoy. It's easy to feel like a mouse in a maze, only ever able to see the next turn. Today is Thursday. Tomorrow is Friday. Even when you complete a week, it just starts again. You complete a year and it starts over. You do a job and the next day, it needs doing again. You get your hair cut, pay your taxes, mow the lawn, and buy groceries. But then, before you know it, you've got to do it all again. Nothing gets finished. The only thing you can put your finger on is that one day follows the next follows the next. Your job is to keep turning the pages. It's easy to feel like dust in the wind, like we're here to go from one place to another and pull levers and push buttons. It's easy to feel like the purpose of life is to get to the end of it. To have "completed one existence." But you are not dust in the wind.

You are not dust in the wind.

You are not your body or where you live or who you know, or even who you are. You are what you choose to be. You are who you influence -- how you make tiny, tiny parts of the world different, and better. Meaning is not defined by being. It is defined by doing. If you do nothing, you are nothing. If someone could pluck you from existence and nothing would change, you've failed. You are the sum total of your actions, words, and deeds. You are the turbulence you leave behind you in the stream of time. You are immortal … if you want to be.

You are immortal as a disruptor.

What about you? If you had been removed from history's equation, how different would the lives of those around you be? If the answer is "not that much," then you're doing it wrong. Time ticks on, and you're only here for a blink. In one sense, you can't make a difference. But in another sense, you can make a huge difference… as long as you don't worry about having a direct line of sight, about saying that YOU, specifically, caused THIS. If you influence who you can, you'll never know what that might mean in a thousand years, if you have a little bit of faith. We can't live forever. Our memories can't live forever. The memories of those who remember our memories can't even live forever. You're kidding yourself if you think that history will remember you -- specifically YOU -- in a million years. But that's very, very different from saying that you aren't shaping the future. You influence people who influence people who influence people, and people you'll never know will be different because, ultimately, you were here.

You were here. You existed.