Legacy Is a Verb

The word legacy usually arrives with estate planners and serious fonts — something arranged, left behind, discussed in past tense while you're still here. That framing wastes it. The people whose legacies actually matter treated legacy as a verb: something done daily, not willed posthumously.

The verb form asks better questions. Not 'what will I leave?' but 'what am I building that outlasts my attention?' A venture that employs people. A body of work that teaches. A community that continues meeting. Students, juniors and children who watched — because example is the only inheritance that never pays estate duty.

This is also, quietly, the answer to the meaning question that visits after fifty. Meaning rarely survives being pursued directly; it arrives as a by-product of building something whose value exceeds your own convenience.

The first half earned. The second half gets to mean. That is not a burden — that is the privilege of the position you have reached.