keyword deathMy wife used her photographic skills to help…

Page 179 keyword epilogue keyword deathMy wife used her photographic skills to help people work out what was key to their life and what was more incidental. She would ask people to choose five objects in a flower to represent their life. She would then ask them to arrange them on a table so that she could photograph them. The result was what she called a modern still these portraits were like visual sermons that celebrated a person's wealth but always included a scholar dead leaves as a reminder that the riches of the world were all vanities and the death comes to everybody. This encouraged people to work out what was critical to their lives as they pondered what to put in the center of their personal picture. You might like to try it. My own life had images of my books that were my work, a food and wine, things that I loved, there was a camera lens to represent my wife and her role in focusing my life but in the center was a little yellow Gumtree sculpture that looked like two teardrops. The sculpture was commissioned and given to me by my children on my 70th birthday. The teardrops they told me were not tears but golden seeds. I had they said help them to find their own golden seeds. The sculpture therefore stood for my children and family but also for my deepest belief in the principle of the golden seed that I discussed earlier. This idea was that everyone is special in some way and that there is an all of us a seed of potential. It is my hope for the human race and the heart of my philosophy of life. Put all these symbolic objects together and you have a as good a definition of what my life is about as you could get.Yes you set off on your life's journey, I would urge you to try anything that looks interesting. You will soon find out whether it suits you or not. Even if it proves to be a dead end or a failure don't worry. You will learn more from your mistakes than from your successes is I discovered them during my early years at work. If you will succeed in life you will make your mark and you will be your own person, not just the inheritor of somebody else's names or somebody else's jeans. If you have lived up to your own potential, major life worthwhile that's when you deserve that prize. Only you will know if you have earned it. It is personal and private to you. It can't be defined they're marked by honors or public a claim but you will know it when you get it. I hope you do.

— from The Landing (Death) · 21 letters on life and its challenges by Charles handy

In the book

Make the list, too, of everything you have already endured that has made you wiser — it is its own kind of inventory of a life. One woman used her photographer's eye to help people choose the five objects, or five images, that best captured what their life had truly been about; do that for yourself, and then go live so the five are true. Meet ordinary moments as if they were the last of their kind. Try to treat each experience with the reverence you would give it if you knew it would never come again. — The Landing (Death)

Work backward from the answer. A friend's wife, a photographer, used to ask people to choose five objects to represent their lives and arrange them to be photographed; the exercise forced them to decide what was central and what was merely incidental — and in the center of her own she placed a small sculpture of two golden seeds her children had given her, standing for her belief that there is in every one of us a seed of unrealized potential. Leave them better than you found them. When I ask people how they want to be remembered, the wisest answer I have heard is the one a man once gave me: "that I left my family in better condition than I found it". — Legacy / The Logbook (Legacy/Epilogue)

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