It’s the first day of June. Summer has officially begun. Well, it’s the first night of June. 1:38 am. I can’t sleep. The moon is waning, but her light is still bright in the sky. Bright enough to keep my overactive thoughts a churning long past when I should have been asleep. I’m pondering things that I can’t share with the public, so why I’m writing I’m not even sure. I guess I hope that by writing something I’ll be able to put my mind at rest so I can eventually get to sleep.

You might be surprised how often that works. I’m not convinced that it’s going to work tonight, but It certainly can’t hurt. And even if it doesn’t work, at least I’ll have written another 500 words or so in my life. I wonder how much I’ve written in my life? It’s a lot. This blog alone contains almost 400 typewritten pages if printed out end to end. In less than three years of posts. That’s no including anything else I’ve written. When I was taking Fiction I at Columbia I wrote over 200 pages in a single semester. It was simple really.

Maybe it’s turning 30, but I’m thinking a lot about legacy lately. About the future. I’m 30 years old. I have a relatively stable career. For the first time in my life I’m beginning to be financially comfortable. I’m understanding how money works and how (I hope) I can make it work for me instead of against me. I’m doing meaningful work in other parts of my life, and I have fulfilling, valuable relationships with friends and family. I have colleagues in and outside of the Brotherhood, many of whom I’m blessed to call friends as well.

The world is turning, changing around me, and I wonder what will I leave for future generations? Will it be these words, so often the equivalent of scribbles on looseleaf pieces of paper? Will it be the things that I’ve taught? The lives that I’ve touched? Will it be the nieces, nephews, and godchildren that I help to raise? Will it be something I haven’t even considered yet? Will I leave nothing behind at all?

I’m not asking myself these questions in a depressing way. In truth I’m just curious. Herbis Orbis and I were talking about vocation again recently. Not about what it is, but about how it colors our view of who we are and what we do. I often find myself confused these days, when I see people devote huge portions of their lives to things that are ultimately meaningless. When I see all a persons energy go into their dedication to a television show they watch religiously, or a fandom to which they are devoted, I often find myself amazed at their commitment. Not because the committment is something I don’t understand, but because it seems that the committment is wholly self-serving, by which I mean it seems to sustain itself, but very little else.

I find it repulsive. If we are to devote ourselves to a project or a community that work should mean something more than an emotional attachment to a reality television show. It makes me profoundly sad to watch a person give such committment to something ultimately meaningless. I must, however, check myself when I feel this. I realize that a good deal of my revulsion over this ‘waste’ of energy is because I am hard-wired by my vocation. Spending such vast amounts of time and energy on something with no impact or meaning beyond immediate emotional gratification is, quite literally, sacreligious to me. But I have to remember that it is sacreligious to me, not to everyone else. It is not in my ethics to hold other people to my standards for myself, nor to demand that they spend their time as fruitfully as I attempt to spend mine.

Nor am I some paragon of self-sacrafice. I do plenty of things just for myself, and I think it’s important that all of us do so. It’s one of the things that I struggled not to model from certain teachers. The pattern of giving too much of myself and not holding enough back is something I stubbornly refuse to perpetuate. But the biggest movements in my life, the moments that are important, that my emotions are driven by, are not self-serving or selfish. They are the moments that point to my legacy, my impact on the world. They are the things that I do that better the lives of the people around me.

Herbis Orbis and I discussed this briefly, and we seemed to agree. It’s important to know what our standards for ouselves are, and equally important to realize that those standards can not be applied to people who do not come equiped with a calling like ours. It is of course, just as important to realize that having a vocation, a calling, doesn’t make us better people. It just means we’re hard-wired with different priorities, different ideas about what legacy is.

I sometimes wonder if the reason so many traditions of priesthood require celibacy is a way of encouraging those in the priesthood to embrace their vocation and become enamoured with the more common concepts of legacy and work. Our culture thinks of legacy most prominently in terms of our children. Our offspring are the gift that we give to the world, and once we begin to procreate a great deal of our energy goes into devotion and service to those children, to prepare them and create a world for them to live in.

In other views we see our legacy as the changes we’ve made. The amount of money we earned, the patents we filed, the companies we started and sold. The idea of economic legacy, of creating or sustaining a dynasty in the financial or political sense is a powerful pull.

And then there is the vocational idea of legacy, which is what I’m finding in myself. My legacy is quite literally leaving the world a better place for having been here. Through writing, teaching, counseling, loving, and suffering. Through all the work that I do, I want this world, and the people in it, to be more full of song, more filled with light, more joyous, more loving, and more beautiful than it was before I got here. I think that is vocation, and that is vocational legacy.

I’m thinking too about duty. Responsibility. What are our responsibilities to the people around us? To our families? To our communities? When do those responsibilities begin to break down? When do they become stronger? I have a lot of thoughts here, but I think I may be able to get some sleep now, so they’ll have to wait for another time.

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