Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Leaving a Legacy

Sunday, August 17, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture moved and inspired me along with millions of others not only for its indomitable optimism but its message of “what you can do today.” His title was “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” but this was deliberately misleading. Randy acknowledged that his lecture wasn’t really about achieving, it’s about living, and what really resonates with me is it’s not about living individually; it’s about living and dreaming together.

Randy’s bio is an impressive list of achievements. He was an award-winning teacher, he received tenure astonishingly young and his students are among the who’s who in the virtual reality industry. He was the founder of a software project called Alice that is freely available and allows thousands of kids to become engaged and have fun learning software programming. His co-taught class “Building Virtual Worlds” at CMU attracted both arts and technology majors whose final projects were so incredible and drew such crowds that the final review was dubbed the academic equivalent of an Ohio State pep rally by the university president. Anyway, you get the message: Randy was an uber-achiever, and his name will live on in many of these efforts.

But, one of his main messages is that we don’t achieve things on our own, but with the help, dedication, and trust of those around us. Yes, he experienced signficant aha moments of going from advising computer science students one on one, to reaching 50 students at a time in his Building Virtual Worlds classes to reaching thousands and potentially millions with his Alice software project. But, he notes that it isn’t just Randy Pausch doing, but the many teams of bright students, dedicated faculty and courageous university officials who all were willing to listen and see the potential in Randy’s dreams and invest some significant sweat equity. He couldn’t have achieved these things alone, and he knows that many of the people he led, gave second chances to, and worked with will continue to build the teams that will carry on this work far into the future.

It struck me that many of the people who have been influential in my life have not just helped me in specific ways, but have inspired and challenged me to make choices that perhaps have the potential to touch others in the same way I was touched. They may not have been as deliberate or conscious as Randy in leaving a legacy, but my encounters with them nonetheless accomplished some similar aha moments about paying it forward.

For example, I will always remember my letter exchanges and personal conversations with my first mentor Elizabeth Silliman this way. Without fail, she would reply with excitement and encouragement to absolutely everything I had said, no matter how trivial, or difficult or powerless my life felt to me at the time. She always made me feel heard, and this was a very powerful feeling. Sometimes, in her responses and words, I would discover that I had learned something new about the experience that I hadn’t been conscious of before. For the teenager I was, when it seemed that life was so regulated by others, these were the times when I got tremendous positive feedback of the impact I had on another person.

One of Elizabeth’s legacies to me that I only understood years later is that for so many of us, these are the experiences — when we first realize we are heard by significant people in our lives — that shape our ability to know that our actions have an impact on others and to take responsibility for that. It was a huge gift that she gave me, and my own aha moment made me willing to look more deeply and honestly at my needs and responsibilities in relationships. Just by being more conscious of my impact on others, I began to see all kinds of encounters as opportunities to choose rather than just to react, to make the impact I wanted when the operating principles are respect and equality, and not to look back with regret and wish I had said or done something differently.

Randy’s legacy is his message that when we dream together, we can be inspired together to accomplish great things on a grand scale. But to become inspired, it may take an Elizabeth who listens at a critical point and lets you know you make a difference. I have been lucky that in my life, there hasn’t only been one Elizabeth that I credit with helping inspire me. I find it meaningful, especially at the end of my three-year term as a worship associate here, to be able to thank many of you in this congregation who also gave me the gift of listening and letting me know that I mattered to you.

 

Sermon: What Will I Leave? by Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern