The influence you have.
My father wrote a book called "Tracks: Memoir of a Vietnam Vet." It wasn't until he was almost 70 years old he'd felt comfortable sharing his story, coming to author, and opening his own non-profits to serve his fellow veterans. The opening word, "tracks" is symbolic for the tracks left behind from the tanks in which he was commander of. As his daughter, it felt like any tracks he was leaving in life were left somewhere else, never with or in me, and by the time I understood the psyche objectively, I realized maybe all of what was left of him as he knew it, was left in Nam until the day he decided to fully come "home" in the sharing of his story.
The problem with the whole of him being left in Vietnam symbolized by tracks of marine corps tanks, was that there were no tracks left by him, for me to step my feet into.
See, most of us want to be told who we are. We turn to religion, the military, a family, or an anti-religion for a sense of belonging. There, they'll tell us who and how to be so we can escape the grueling discovery of the guess work it takes to become who we truly are. Truly, it's easier to be told who we are except that those of us who've been negatively projected upon before we were of age to decipher if the projection was accurate, believed we were nothing. Like my father felt after PTSD, he felt as if he were nothing, an influential-less murderer while to me, he was everything. He just couldn't see me through the war that never left him.
It is indeed easier to walk a path already paved, but I'd never been shown a path, never saw any tracks to guide me home. Not because I wanted to, but because I was forced to, I had to learn to trail blaze paths that weren't there, even as a child, just to make sense of myself in a world that made zero.
Yesterday my three year old screamed in excitement, "Mommy! Look! You making tracks!" It was her first snow as a cognizant human being. Meeting her in her awe I said, "I am! And look at you! You are too!"
She stopped. Stared with bulging eyes, started walking backwards, took a little spin, and jumped up and down screeching, "I making tracks!!!"
She sometimes walked in my footsteps the rest of the way home, sometimes stepped out into her own, but felt immense influence in the free will to step into either as the snow catered to our feet. To say this moment was magical would be an understatement. Her discovery was simple yet profound. Indeed she, like the animals in which she associates tracks, was influential enough to leave a mark in something as huge as nature herself.
I remember explaining my philosophy on relationships, all relationships, to an old friend who wanted me to consider her my only friend. She felt my extended nature to making many people feel validated was a cop out to the loyalty she felt I should have toward her. She was a grown woman who though bulked at the philosophy, simultaneously wanted to adopt it merely because she wanted to control that which she didn't trust, which was the intention behind my philosophy itself. The thing is, I don't consider my philosophy to be a philosophy but a reality.
We're all leaving trails, like fish creating currents in water, kids walking in snow, and soldiers in Vietnam, merely by existing in the first place. We don't get away with making moves that don't impact the entirety of the grid. It's really up to us to decide how we want that impact to feel, and to create from that which we want it to feel like.
Science now shows us that phantom DNA, which is the energetic imprint of the genetic coding of anyone who's walking into or been in a particular time space reality over the last 30 days, can be picked up and validated scientifically, to still linger where the body no longer walks. This is why it's important who we associate with, to what extent we let them into our space, and this is also why they say we're only as good as the five people we hang out with most. Our DNA is merging with those we pass whether we're terrified of that thought or not.
Studies have been done where people are asked to spit into a petri dish and then taken into another room to be shown emotionally charged photographs. Them, along with their saliva, hooked up to electrodes to measure changes in the biochemical atmosphere of the body, with each change in chemical release based on the emotional charge being summoned, their saliva in the next room, instantaneously changes. I did say, instantaneously. DNA outside of the body is still responsive to the DNA inside of the body. It can't be separated, even in separation.
Intuitively I've always felt the need to leave what I called positive "trails." From love notes, to smiles, to leaving bits of me that feel good for the people I want to feel good, I've always believed that how we make people feel, isn't only selfless in that it makes them feel good to be seen and validated, but it's also self-full (notice I didn't say selfish) because how someone feels about us, is how they will feel when they think about us.
As an empath, it's always felt important to me because how people feel about us, will be a projection onto us when they think of us, and some of us are blessed and cursed simultaneously, to feel, act, and create from that projection. If we are trained in our empathy we will merely feel from it. If we are untrained in our empathy we may subconsciously act and create from those projections, and if they are negatively charged projections, we're liable to think we are nothing, and become everything about that projection merely because it's easier to be told what we are, than to create it for ourselves.
The tracks or trails we leave are real, ongoing, and don't end with death. They linger on with our whole human family. When we know we are leaving them, we can no longer skirt out of responsibility for the lives we create, nor for the trails we don't want to take responsibility for creating so other people may safely, step onto our tracks, until they're emotionally grown enough to no longer need other footprints as guides. When we understand our impact, we may not be as in awe, as my daughter. We may be scared for what we have, or haven't yet left on the planet, but it's in the knowing of how influential our being truly is, that we finally take the trails we leave, seriously, and ideally, leave them for good, for good.
Even if your life isn't perceived by you or anyone else as influential, you are a legacy leaving machine and it's left in the imprint of how we make those we connect with, feel. Leave a legacy worth feeling, not only the worlds sake, but for your life's sake.