Leaving something behind

We write to change the world

Not long ago I listened to an audiobook called Sweet and Low, the story of the Brooklyn-based family that created the artificial sweetener by the same name. These family members, unfortunately, through time, allowed selfishness and greed to destroy generations of love and family ties. Author Rich Cohen, the inventor’s grandson whose own family was cut off from inheriting any money, realizes as he writes the memoir that his inheritance was not in the millions of dollars but in the story itself. Words and stories alone can be a legacy bequeathed.

Many of my friends are accomplished seamstresses and quilters, but I don’t sew or quilt and I don’t paint or even garden well. In fact, I create very few tangible things. Instead, my creative gifts tend to revolve around organizing, but these efforts seldom seem to last. Hardly a legacy.

So, I write. Maybe I write because, just as my friends are leaving behind baby blankets and beautiful dresses, somewhere in my soul I, too, want to leave something behind. For whatever they're worth, words may be the only tangible inheritance my children and grandchildren ever get from me.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world….The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way…people look at reality, then you can change it.               

~ James Baldwin

Am I writing to change the world? Perhaps not through literature but, yes, I suppose I am writing to change the world, if only my own little universe.