Warning, this is not a review about Jack Mabaso, Gadaffi, Tshidi and others, rather, I want to elaborate more on what us as human beings, inherit from the generations before us and what we then unconsciously sometimes, pass on to the next generations.
I asked a few people what they are going to leave their future generations with when they finally pass on from this life, and I got a variety of answers, which made me ponder on the way in which we are made different, we might be similar in terms of how a human being is made but our mindsets differ, and they go on to influence a number of decisions we take in our day to day lives.
Whenever the word legacy is mentioned, one automatically thinks of material possessions they can pass on to the next generations such as, rings, estates, businesses etc. I applied my mind on the different things we can inherit from the generation before us, we can talk of material possessions such as businesses and estates, character traits, skills (soccer, dancing), intelligence, and diseases/sicknesses.
There might be more that we can inherit but I want to zone in on the character traits, both good and bad, that we inherit from generations before us such as generosity, loving others, hatred, stinginess, kindness, humility, lying, honesty, gossip, diligence, patience, laziness, greed, endurance, cowardice, anger, respect and cruelty. These are just a few of them, but we can easily inherit these traits from our parents as much as one can develop them at any period in their lives.
My father once told my mother who then told me that he said he regretted how he used to treat his uncle’s children when they where growing up together, he used to harass them with his mega amplified voice to do as he wanted, since he was the eldest. The same way he treated them, my younger brother now treats the siblings after him and everyone who is younger than him. This made ponder that the bad character traits we continually portray in our day to day lives, will have a negative effect on our children, their children, their children and so on and so forth.
A number of thieves can simply do a background check and they will certainly find out that before them, there where well-known thieves in their bloodline and there is high chance, they will pass on that trait to the next generation. Anger seems to be one-character trait that is easily transferable to the next generation, as many suffer from such, you will find the previous generation affirming that, this one gets angry similarly to someone who was before them in their bloodline, this is because as we live our lives, we will most certainly transfer a number character traits to the next generation whether we like it or not.
There are some good character traits we inherit from previous generations and more of what we inherit should be those, than the bad ones. Judging from my own perspective, I know diligence, generosity, kindness, humility and endurance are character traits I inherited from both my parents of which some they got from their parents.
It is really important that on a day to day basis we should ask ourselves if the character we are portraying to others, is what we want to see our children living by, even when we are no longer in this world. If we really sit ourselves down, we will see that there are so many similarities to how our parents interacted with other people and how we do the same.
It is not all doom and gloom, but we inherited good as well and that is what we should strive for our children and future generations to inherit. Let us now therefore work on the bad traits we have now, so that future generations must not suffer. Let us leave a legacy that we`ll be proud of on all fronts
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