How to Be Memorable

Not long ago I read one of those “10 things I couldn’t live without” pieces from Joanna Goddard, the Cup of Jo Instagram influencer. This type of light fare usually offers a new book or lipstick to consider but I discovered something in her list that gave me pause.

“I just love having different types of art in a room. It’s one of life’s great pleasures. I’ll switch things around a lot. You know how sometimes if you have a piece of art, you’re so used to seeing it in a certain place, you don’t see it anymore? When you move it around, you appreciate things anew.”

The first thing I did was enter my kitchen with a new perspective. Among art on display all over the house really but particularly in that room are representations of maternal joy. A favorite photo of my children. An large abstract sculpture of a mother and child. The miniature glass set of a mamma piggy and her three little piggies.

I found I didn’t want to move any of it around, but I did want to add something new to the tableau and what I pulled out was a cup my mother gave me a couple years before she died. A lifelong textile artist, she discovered painting and sculpture in her widowhood. She reproduced some of her favorite paintings on mugs and printed poems on the reverse side.

I gifted myself an espresso maker recently and there I saw the opportunity to move art around, bring myself joy, enhance my noticing. I moved my mom’s cup to the shelf above the machine and her memory is animated anew every morning when I make a coffee.

Then I went outside to visit my favorite tree at the peak of its glory. And realized this new way of seeing is part of nature’s old wisdom: the ritual of spring’s arrival bursting art into being urges us to appreciate it anew.

The Black Tulip Magnolia tree pictured here was a gift from the families of the students I taught from first to eighth grade. When our journey through primary school was complete, and I was moving to Oregon, they offered to make me a gift. What did I want? I asked them for a tree that would grow as they would and every year when it blossomed would bring each and every one of them to my heart and mind. It was about half its sized when it was planted 10 years ago and delights me more with every passing year.

Often when I work with clients on their estate planning the conversation turns to legacy. How do you want to be remembered? This pondering on art and appreciation shifted my thinking on how to be memorable: pay attention.

It’s there on the cup, the poem When that my mother paired with her painting.

When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know

any of us, what happens then.

So I try not to miss anything.

I think, in my whole life, I have never missed

The full moon

or the slipper of its coming back.

Or, a kiss.

Well, yes, especially a kiss.”

― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems