In an attempt to reflect on and learn from the past year in my life, I am answering random questions. I have looking over the internet for “conversation starters”, and I have randomized them. Each day that I write, I take one of them at random – hence the “random” question – and answer it based on my life experience over the past year.
Today’s random question is: would you rather be hated or forgotten?
This is a tough one. Most people that I know want to be remembered for something good. We want to be remembered as someone who brought meaning and purpose into someone else’s life. For me, I want to be thought of as someone who helped others succeed in different areas of their life. I don’t want to be hated. However, I don’t want to be forgotten as well. This is difficult because my pride comes into play.
Being hated means you are remembered for something horrible. If I am dead and gone, I don’t want people remembering me as the one that crashed into their loved one’s car and we all died. I don’t want my family being harassed and threatened because of something I did intentionally or unintentionally. Those actions that I did should not affect my loved ones, and yet our actions do affect our loved ones whether we want them to or not.
That leads me into living here and now remembering to make mindful choices that impact others in a negative way. I am confident that I have made some choices in my life that have led to hurt and anguish, and I am absolutely sorry for those choices. There are just some things out of my control at this point. I can not undo those choices. What I can do is acknowledge those choices and attempt to make restitution and fix what I can. However, I cannot go back and change these things because that is not how time works.
The decision to be forgotten is a difficult one to make. But it is my only option to be completely self-less, which is my ultimate goal. To be forgotten is to have the memory of you erased from everything good and bad. All of the contributions that you have made to help others and teach others and safeguard others either gets misattributed to someone else or simply gets forgotten. Those things that you works hard on and spent so much time on gets piled in with the rest of the contributions to society and your name gets disassociated with it. However, it was for the greater good that the work you did or the contribution you made helped the community or society as a whole in whatever small or large role it played. If given the only two choices of ‘hated’ or ‘forgotten’, I would have to choose, in my heart of hearts, forgotten. And again my pride is saying not to be forgotten, but truly that is what I would say at this point that I would do.
What would you do? This one was a difficult one.
Gotta go fill up my cup…..
Coffee with Candee 