what is admirable

Perhaps because I have never really felt admirable or assured in my own sense of worth, I wonder in what way I might like to feel admirable after my death. What benchmark of man or woman might I like to be held in the same breath with or by what yardstick raised up?

It is a queer question.

Not by pyramids or parenting or fear or greed or beauty or intellect, I think. Nor even spiritual conviction, though I have dipped my toe in that pond. If I might choose people I admired and would not especially mind being corralled with, Marcus Aurelius or George Orwell or my one-time shrink Jack Gallahue come to mind as admirable men whose passions seemed to address the facts on the ground, but hitching my star to theirs seems a bit childish and perhaps wildly inaccurate.

I guess I would hope not to have done too much harm, but beyond that I cannot think of the flash of individualized lightning by which I might retrospectively have caused others to go "ooooh!" and bestow laurels.

I never invented a light bulb, never scaled a notable precipice, never amassed much wealth, never touched base with the elusive "fifteen minutes of fame." By this, I reckon myself as a  blob of cookie dough, but it seems reasonable to ask what flavor it was.

I guess I can be grateful that I was never Kim Kardashian or some other air head, but my own air-head-dom is probably not all that different ... though I have my fingers crossed.

Are others more at ease with this "admiration" business -- even the ones bound and determined to show how adult and at ease they are? I really don't know.

Strange to think that everyone might like to be "admirable" in one way or another and yet ... well ... what is admirable?