What can time and dedication achieve? A great deal

I saw this report in the Daily Mail newspaper and it reminded me that in this age of the pre-packed, pre-prepared almost everything, you can build extraordinary things from scratch.

The part finished cathedral 12 miles outside of Madrid

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2402990/Former-monk-Justo-Gallego-Martinez-spends-50-YEARS-creating-giant-cathedral-junk.html

A cathedral built from junk and discarded building materials,  by just one former monk, without a crane over the course of 50 years.

Of course as construction has taken so long, Juston Gallego Martinez may never see his church completed but when asked about the building by the BBC he said

'If I lived my life again, I'd build this cathedral again only bigger.
'Twice the size, because for me, this is an act of faith.'

The former Trappist monk who started construction of the cathedral after surviving TB

It makes me wonder about what anyone can achieve give simple time, effort and dedication.

On the nature of death

It sounds like a morbid title for a blog post doesn't it?

I've been thinking about death, not the dying bit or even what comes after death (if anything). No, more on what impact our individual lives have on the world.  What do we leave behind? Which people did we touch in some way? What mark did we leave on the universe?

All this pondering started with the death of Frank. Frank was not a relative, he was an older man who lived across the road from me. How old was he? Perhaps in his middle eighties, I have lived in the same house for more than 10 years now and he seemed elderly even when I moved in.

We passed the time of day, said hello and good morning, even sent each other Christmas cards but truthfully I didn't know much about him.

Recently an ambulance arrived near our house, it's not often a good sign having the yellowy green wagon parked up. This time it was for Frank. His final journey whilst in this world.

So it fell to his family to clear his home and deal with his estate. There followed a succession of skips placed on his driveway. The contents of his life were piled into them. One affected me more than the others, it had a child's plastic jeep toy perched on the top. I imagine it had been kept back as a toy for the grandchildren to play with.  It was a bit like this one in the picture.

Is this what we are left with?

 And that's when I almost cried. Is that all a man's life is? I asked myself. A collection of skips and 20 black plastic bags of rubbish to be cleared from a home?

Of course not; but it was a deeply sobering moment. What mark do we leave on the universe when our physical self is gone? If we have children then in a sense we have a mark that continues into the future but what else? For those of us who do not write great literature or create wonderful works of art, what do we leave? Are we no more than a few builders skips of stuff and 20 black plastic bin bags?

In a way this is our search for significance, our ego wanting to have its way. But still each of us searches for that significance.

Then I spoke with a friend who had similar discussions and had been told about a book called 'The five people you meet in heaven'. It's on Amazon here
http://www.amazon.com/The-Five-People-Meet-Heaven/dp/1401391346

I have yet to read it, but it's a parable about the impacts and effects we have on people as we travel through life, effects that we may be barely aware of.

Perhaps your smile one morning helped someone to keep going instead of taking an overdose. Perhaps as you let a car out form a side road you prevented an accident that would have maimed another. Perhaps our search for significance is that accumulation of simple good deeds that helped others be better than they would have been.

What mark will you be leaving on the universe?