The dash...

You know, when we die, we really get ripped off. I was pondering the passing of my Uncle the other day and I remember standing at his graveside and reading the stone. I recall many of the headstones, grave markers, tomb doors and other stele of our mortality and I realized that our entire life: everything that we did, saw, heard, felt, tasted; everyone we met and impacted; every deed famous and infamous, fulfilling and flawed, EVERYTHING...was represented by the little dash between the dates.

For something so seemingly insignificant, that little mark, the rude cut in the stone, the merest scratch on a so patently permanent stone surface is, in fact, you. It's both amazing and a little embarrassing at the same time. There is the implicit contradiction of, "Wow all that meaning" vs."It's such a little mark." 

How do you fill your dash? You fill it with who you are and what you do and the expanding ripples you leave in your wake. But always remember that YOU are the one filling in the dash. You choose what to put in it--like crafting the recipe of your life. I remember reading a story that included a dialog between a Native American gentleman and his grandson. They were discussing the what kind of a person you can turn out to be. The conversation went something like this:

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"Grandson, you have two dogs inside you: a good one and an evil one. They constantly fight each other in order to decide how you are going to act--what kind of a person you will be."

"But, Grandpa, which one will win?"

"The one you feed."

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It took me a long time to start feeding the right dog. He's happy and healthy and content to be curled up next the hearth. The evil dog? Haven't seen him in a while. I can hear him scratching at the door once in a while, whining to be let in--heard him a few times in the last month--but he's not coming back in. 

Live your life so that, when people see that little line, they think, "That was a hell of a dash!"