Living Your Dash

Yesterday, in one of the eulogies at my grandfather’s funeral, I heard a term I had never heard before: living the dash. Meaning that in the end, there will be your birthday and the date you die, and in between them is your dash. And how you live your dash is the most important.

This also got me thinking about perspective. There seems to be a lot of really bad mojo going on at the moment for a whole lot of people. I often hear people curse a particular year for being so horrible. However I truly think that if you look very closely, there’s always just as much good to be found. Sometimes you’re so focused on the negative that you blind yourself to all the good.

Let me use my own life as an example. You could look at my 2015 and see this: 2 automobile accidents, one totaling a friend’s car, one totaling my car. I’m in the worst shape I’ve been in for the last 12 years. I’m frustrated at some of my career obstacles. My grandfather died. My father is on hospice with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. I could probably find a lot more to bitch about as well. And there’s plenty more apparently going on in other people’s lives that I know.

But you know what? That’s not how I see my 2015. Amazingly, I emerged from both accidents almost entirely uninjured when both could have easily been fatal if any of a thousand details were different. I moved in with my amazing girlfriend into an amazing place in an amazing neighborhood. I couldn’t ask for anyone more loving or supportive of me. I am basically pretty damn healthy, now have a gym membership and both she and I are prosperous enough to lead a pretty great life, and I’m not working some soul sucking job but doing things I love and am passionate about.

My grandfather led an amazing and long life and in his death I heard so many stories and learned so many things about him that I never knew. I saw a humbling outpouring of people talking about how much he’d affected their lives. 2 hours of visitation with a line out the door the entire time of people waiting to give their condolences and memories of this great man. I saw many relatives I rarely get to see.

Even now, I marvel at our technogical world beyond what scifi imagined not all that long ago as I use the airplane wifi. I joked that this is what is feels like to be a god. A slow, lethargic God. I’m on my way to see my dad, and to put it totally bluntly, probably for the last time. But I have the luxury of doing do. And had to pass up a callback audition to do so. I have a choice in how I feel and view the world and my life. And as much as possible I choose love and joy and gratitude. Because even as I sit here now, I could easily come up with far more good things to list than bad. The universe is going to throw things at you that you don’t want or feel you aren’t ready for or can only see as “bad things” but nothing is inherently good or bad. There’s always Yin to Yang and vice versa. We are all human and will not always succeed at our endeavors or efforts to live how we want to live or be who we want to be. And that’s just fine. Just do your best to make sure that once that final date comes, that the dash in between was what mattered. Have a dense and well-lived dash.