leaving a mark

I was folding a paper crane today and suddenly wondered who it was that had first created it.  I don't know how many times I've folded a paper crane; maybe a hundred times or nearly two hundred times, and the question never occurred to me until today.

Since I read The Fault in Our Stars two weeks ago, I've been thinking about the meaning of life for the hundredth time.  The book is about two teenagers with cancer who fall in love.  It's one of the most romantic love stories I've ever known, but what struck me most was the boy's strong desire to leave a mark on the world.  Most of my close friends do not seem to have this kind of desire, and I always thought it was just me.  I guess the desire is pretty evident in the obsession towards fame we occasionally see in our societies, but still, most of my friends are like the boy's girlfriend who he admires because of her uniqueness of not having that arrogant desire.  And I've wondered why.

The boy writes a eulogy for her before he dies, and it shows how he lets go of his own desires -- he comes to the conclusion that most of us can't leave any mark, and even when we do, it's not always a good one; we can cause harm too.  So what's important is not what we can do to the universe, but what we can observe from it.  We're here to listen to what the universe has to say, and accept it as it is.

I almost hated the book because I loved it.  It's kind of embarrassing to admit it, but since I've already mentioned it here in this blog -- I always wanted to be a writer and the dream is not yet dead completely.  When I really like a book, it inevitably reminds me of what I will never be.  It's really embarrassing that I even need to be "reminded"; it's an obvious fact.  So why do I still want to be a writer?  Apart from the fact that I like writing, I think it boils down to that desire of leaving a mark on the world.  If I didn't care about marks, why is it not enough to write a story and keep it private?  Why am I even making this writing public?

I actually found it somewhat contradictory and ironic that a million seller book -- a book that leaves a mark -- insists that leaving a mark is not important.   But what does it even mean to "leave a mark"?

I don't think anyone desires to leave a physical mark.  No one would want a statue of themselves made if there was no one who looked at it and remembered them.  Leaving a mark obviously means leaving a mark in people's minds -- securing a place for yourself in the minds of future people.  A good story touches people's hearts over and over, gives the same experience to countless people even after the author's death.

Having said that, it's only an experiece -- one of the many we all go through in our lifetime.  A story may touch my heart, but there are also so many other things that touch my heart.  Among those many experiences, the story is only a dot in my life.  Of course there are big dots and small dots, dots I will remember for a long time, and those that disappear right away.  But everything, in the end, is a dot that makes up my life.  The nameless person who created the paper crane for the first time in human history, and all the great writers and scientists, and all my ancestors who did or didn't make history -- they are all important to my life in the same way.

A couple of days ago, my French uncle went back to France to visit his ill mother (I met her fifteen years ago when we used to live in France).  I wrote her a letter in French (she only speaks French), and it took four hours.  Maybe I could've done something more productive, something that would've led to leaving a mark on this world or whatever, but today, I received an email from my aunt telling me that her mother (in law) had read the letter aloud and had dropped tears.  She had read it again and again.  Considering the fact that she ususally has no family around her, I knew how much the letter meant to her.  And I thought -- well, even if I can't write a great story like I once dreamed, I can still create a dot in someone else's life.  I may not be able to create millions of dots in millions of lives, but still, there are dots for me to create by living my own life with a bit of compassion.

A movie I just finished watching, Quelques Heurs de Printemps, reminded me of my uncle and his mother.  I was greatly moved by the scenery the protagonist's mother saw as she traveled to the place where her euthanasia was to be conducted.  It was just trees and the blue sky you see every spring, and yet, when I saw it through her eyes, when I thought this was the last sky I was going to see, I felt like I really had to see it properly.  To remember it clearly.  But when you know your memory is only going to last for another few hours, that it's going to disappear with you altogether, what value does it have?  It's always only that moment that counts -- memento mori, carpe diem.

So rather than worrying about how many dots I can create to "leave a mark", I might as well go to bed now so I can enjoy tomorrow -- a new day that will never come back.