I have no clue how I ended up in college. I just applied to a school and went 90 minutes down the road. While there, I found community and joined bands, hoping that one day I’d make it as a musician, touring the nation and the world and becoming famous. That’s, at least, what I thought. When I had those dreams, I didn’t think about them in relation to the furture, the future that exists beyond my own mortal existence. I didn’t think about a legacy, a lasting impact on the world around me. No, I just thought about gratification for my own dreams and what I thought I wanted to do with my life. These broader thoughts about the expansive world, temporally and spatially, never even entered into my mind. As I got older, I realized that my dreams of musical stardom would never come true, but that didn’t stop me from continuing to write and record music that will last beyond my own existence.

Each of us exists within the vast expanse of the world and its history. Each of us is one speck of billions and billions who have existed before us, exist with us, and will exist long after us. When I think about this, I ask myself, “What will my legacy be?” I have no delusions that I will be someone whom people remember long after my death. I have no delusions, or really even any desire, to be known across the globe during my lifetime. Yet, I think about what my impact will be, what my legacy will be beyond my immediate circle of family and friends. Will I have one? Will I exist beyond my physical death in the minds of people I have never and will never meet? Does it even matter?

I constantly ask myself, particularly with this blog and other pieces that I write, if I have an impact. I ponder whether or not people read what I write, engage with it, and take something away from it. I’ve been writing regularly on Interminable Rambling, in some fashion, since 2015, and I’ve always pondered this. I’ve gotten to points where I want to stop writing, telling myself, I can take a week or two off, but I always keep coming back, partly because I’ve trained myself to write and partly because writing, as I tell my students, helps me think through things and figure what my positions on topics. Inevitably, and without fail, when I have these thoughts someone mentions my work and tells me how it has impacted them.

None of us ever really realize the ways we touch others. None of us ever really realize the ways that what we do impact those we may never meet. I was reminded of this recently during a conversation with someone on the other side of the world. During our conversation, the person told me that they knew my work through a piece I published in Bitter Root. They told me about their research and how my work on Ernest Gaines may influence it. When the person told me this, I immediately thought about Ta-Nehisi Coates writing about his interactions with people in Dakar and saying, “There I was on the other side, among family divided from each other by centuries. I had come back. But my own writing had gotten here first.”

What I do matters. What I do travels. I am not just speaking about works that I produce or things that I create. I am speaking about actions, about how I treat others, what I say, what I do in my day to day life. Every interaction I have with someone has an impact. It either plants a seed or it wastes the seed, causing it not to grow. The interaction I have with someone at the store has an impact. The interaction at a restauraunt. The smile. The wave. The acknowledgement of someone else’s existence. All of these have an impact that we will never know because they see so fleeting, so trivial, but they matter.

As a teacher, what I do in the classroom matters. I’ve taught for over twenty years, and over that time, I have encountered countless students, too many for me to remember or count. Like the seeds I plant in my everyday interactions with those I do not know, I plant seeds with my students, seeds that contain a part of me that will grow and reproduce long after I wither and go back to the earth. I plant these seeds because, as Reinhold Neibuhr stated, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint.” We must think about the future. We must think about ourselves within the context and flow of history, and we must recognize that we cannot do anything, at all, alone. We need one another.

In Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, Hannah Arendt traces the life of Rahel Varnhagen, a 19th century Jewish socialite in Germany and Europe. Arendt completed the manuscript in 1938, while she was in exile, fleeing from the Nazis. It’s as much an historical biography as it is a contemporary work on the Nazi regime’s violence and destruction of the German Jewish community at that period. Arendt constructs the biography around Rahel’s letters, and in those letters Rahel examines her role within history. She writes, at one point, “Everyone has a fate who knows what kind of fate he has.”

As a Jewish woman in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Rahel works to assimilate into German society, shedding any connection she has to her Jewish ancestry. Try as she might, she cannot do this. She asks at one point, “What is a man without his history? Product of nature — not personality.” To this question and answer, Arendt adds, “The history of any given personality is far older than the individual as product of nature, begins long before the individual’s life, and can foster or destroy the elements of nature in its heritage.”

Arendt points out that we enter the world by entering into an already formed history, a past that impacts us upon our debut on the world stage. That history consists of people and events we will never know, either personally or even intellectually, but they impact us. They form us in ways that we may never ever realize. They serve as the soil where our seed grows. They serve as the fertilizer that nourishes the soil. They serve as the water. They serve as the sunlight. They have a hand in forming us before we ever even realize who we are ourselves.

Again, I ask myself, “What will my legacy be?” What will I leave behind to help nourish the seeds I planted? What part of me will survive? What part of me, that no one even knows is a part of me, will linger? Why does it matter? Why should I care? I care because I know that the world I envision, a world of equity and equality, will not exist within my lifetime. I know a world where no child goes to bed hungry will not exist in my lifetime. I know that war will not cease in my lifetime. I know, though, that my hopes for these things exisist and that my fight for them will impact those around me and continue past my lifetime. I know that each of us will impact those who come after us because each of us exists within a history that will form the future. Each of our specks matter because each of our specks reside next to other specks and other specks and other specks, creating the whole of existence. We must think about ourselves in this manner, in relation not just to ourselves and the present but in relation to billions of others who will never know.

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.