Complicated Legacies

Trey Smith

As I perused the headlines this morning, one jumped out and grabbed me in the throat: Joe Paterno Dead at Age 85. The legendary coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions died from complications of lung cancer.

Until this past autumn, the man would have been remembered solely as a great college football coach, supporter of education, husband and father. Tributes would have poured in from around the country. But all that changed amid the sexual abuse scandal that engulfed his university. One of the results of the scandal was that the long-time and revered coach was summarily fired in mid-season.

Because of this one situation and how Coach Paterno handled or didn't handle it, his legacy is complicated. As CBS national sports columnist Gregg Doyel writes,

How will Joe Paterno be remembered? That's up to you, and only you.

In the coming days you will be told how to remember the winningest coach in college football history, but beware of those stories. Some of them will be written by people with an agenda, some by people who idolized Paterno for all he did on the football field from 1966-2011, others by people who despised Paterno for all he didn't do when told about Jerry Sandusky in 2002.

You will be given instructions on how to remember Joe Paterno by people propping themselves up as experts on the topic, but there is only one expert here, and that expert is you.

Doyel is right and not just in reference to Joe. Each life lived -- no matter how long or short -- is complicated. Long lives are filled with noble gestures and deplorable errors in judgment. For all the good we give to life, we also dish out a lot of bad. Even the very worst among us possesses endearing qualities and the best among us can be annoying and irritating, at times.

Short lives -- some spanning a few mere minutes or hours -- are complicated by the emotions of those who survive. We must wrestle with the hopes and dreams vanquished by a sometimes cruel and unforgiving world.

For me, this is why one of central lessons of Taoism -- be ever present in the moment -- is so vitally important. We spend so much of our finite time in this realm looking backward and forward that we often neglect the here and now. Because we divide our attention, we miss those things staring us in the face.

It is when we are being inattentive to the now that we often engage in missteps. Most of these missteps are trivial ones, forgotten in the blink of an eye. Some, however, blow up into gargantuan proportions to the point of blotting out all the good that we may have wrought.

One such misstep can open the door to tarnishing a legacy.