The Little Things
February 23, 2015

Gosh- that title sounds a little depression, right? I promise it gets better from here 🙂 Recently I talked about the book Thrive by Arianna Huffington. I wanted to share another quote and idea from the book that really stuck out to me:

“It is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: “The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president.” Or: “He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure.” Or: “She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.” Or: “He never made it to his kid’s Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time.” Or: “While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night.” Or: “His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.” Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.”

It’s easy to get caught up in life with the “to-dos”, worries, fears, tasks of daily living, and whatever else fills our time. It’s easy to live in passivity and reactivity than in intentionally making choices about how we use our time, making sure that those choices are lining up with our values and our ideals.

Sometimes I wonder what will be said about me in my eulogy, and I hope that it’s not just a list of accomplishments that I’ve had in the work world (even though I’m pouring in a huge amount of time and energy into my jobs to make things happen right now- and I love that!). I hope that when people think of me after I’m gone, they think of me as so much more than the accomplishments that I’ve had. Maybe that’s why this quote stuck out to me so much. It’s a great reminder that it’s important to live our life in the ways that we actually value in our lives, in a way that we would actually want to be remembered. I want to continue to place value in the things that are actually valuable and actually last in life. 

Eulogies How We Are Remembered Quote

I gave the eulogies at both my grandpa and grandma’s funerals, and both times I can tell you that not an ounce of me thought about their lists of accomplishments. I jumped to the funny stories and memories, the moments I felt valued and loved, the things I learned from their lives, and what they inspired within me. These are the things we remember.

While it seems a little morbid, it’s not a bad idea to think about how you want to be remembered, and what you want people to say about you as they stand up to give a eulogy at your funeral. What would you want them to say? Are you living life in a way that lines up with how you want to be remembered? Only you can live your life, and you, in large part, get to determine how you are remembered. It’s wise for each of us to live in ways that allow us to intentionally choose the things we value and live out of those things.

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