What would Ozymandias think now?

Ozymandias was the Greek name used in antiquity for the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramesses II.

Ramesses II was the most powerful Pharaoh of the Egyptian Empire. Born around 1300 BC, he built all over Egypt to an extent and on a scale second only to the great pyramids. His building projects were a tribute to himself and to his “divine nature” and were constructed on a scale no previous Pharaoh had attempted.

Today little remains of his monumental structures – temples, palaces and statuary, and we know him mainly through the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley as Ozymandias;

Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

So then, how can we leave an indelible mark on the world? Should we leave an indelible mark on the world?

Ozymandias tried, as many kings have tried, to immortalize themselves in stone.

Great artists and musicians, perhaps more through devotion to their art and less because of vanity have left their mark on the world. How much less would the world be without Monet, Manet, Picasso and Matisse?

Great scientists from Newton through to Einstein have left their mark on the world. Where would we be without Alexander Fleming, the father of antibiotics?

The philosophies of some of our great thinkers echo through the centuries and millennia and inform our views of the world and the universe today – Plato, Socrates, Descartes.

Not everyone has it within themselves to become a great artist, a great philosopher or a great Scientist. We cannot all be Cleopatra.

Still though, we all have our chance to burn brightly in our own unique way before we fade away.

What could our great contribution to the world be?

Maybe our greatest contribution to the world would be to start every day with one idea and on most days, more often than not, to fulfil that idea.

What could this revolutionary idea be?

To start each day with the objective of making the day of each person you meet better than it would have been if they hadn’t met you – with a smile, a helping hand, an encouraging word.

“Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.” John Lennon