Friday, July 16, 2010

Sour: How Will You be Remembered?

I have been thinking a lot lately about death and the significance of our time on earth. I have been thinking about what’s important/what’s not, what I want to spend my time doing, etc. Mostly since I have come back from travelling, I have really put my ducks in a line and found a sense of direction.

Recently I watched a biography on Johnny Cash. This wasn’t the flashy blockbuster hit with Joaquin Phoenix-it was merely some late night program a channel-surfer would surly flip past. The relevance of this program was that it was a tribute to his life and aspects of his life I had never seen.

Toward the end, Johnny Cash’s devotion to religion was revealed, and it made me curious why I had never seen this side of him. In all of the coverage I had witnessed of his life, I had never heard this about him, and to be honest, it changed a lot of how I feel about him now. People have picked over his life and displayed what they have thought to be the most interesting. There are so many ideas, deeds, successes, lessons lost with death. What makes me sad about this is that we have no control of what people remember of us.

The program constantly displayed Johnny Cash’s name with the dates of his life tied with it. “The Man in Black”, “Mr. Cash”, “Johnny Cash 1932-2003”-his last title.
The dates you lived forever become attached to you as if it were your legacy. Those dates do not justify a life.

When I die, I don’t want to be remembered from the time I began to the time I supposedly ended. I hope to be remembered as an idea that is and can never be completely the same again.

Jess

No comments:

Post a Comment