Life is peculiar. Think about it. We come into this world, we live and then we leave. Birth on one end, death on the other…it’s what you put in the middle that makes it tasty. That middle is like a sandwich.
You don’t need a gourmet spread in your sandwich every time; but you can stuff it with the bits you love, the parts you crave, and a few things you only added because they were there. Sometimes it’s full of baloney! Mine usually includes a wild streak of hot sauce and it can get messy at times. But however we choose to fill in between the two pieces of bread, It should all makes sense when we bite in.
In between life and death there’s a dash between the year we’re born and the year we die. The dash is the only part we get to write.
The mad dash in between is the most important thing. It’s how we choose to live and what we do to accomplish everything we want. If we’re not careful, the dash can end in a flash.
How do you like your life? I prefer mine well done, thank you.
I want to live it like it’s a limited-edition, full-flavored, double-chocolate scoop with sprinkles ride. Always sprinkles and a side of sparkle.
Because…
That dash; so small on the page, yet it holds everything. It’s the quiet punctuation between two dates on a tombstone, but in truth, it’s the sum total of a life: every sunrise watched, every tear shed, every laugh shared.
It’s where we fall in love, fail forward, grow older, and gather meaning. It doesn’t shout. It whispers in the choices we make daily…making insightful choices, how we treat people, what we chase, what we let go of. Living well isn’t about making that dash longer; it’s about making it deeper, fuller and more awake.
I believe that a book I read as part of a book club, got me started thinking about all of this. I didn’t enjoy the book Midnight Library by Matt Haig as a whole, however; the idea that someone wasn’t happy with her life and then got several chances to try different versions of the life she could’ve had, made me think that we should try to get the life we have right now, as right as humanly possible. Life is not a dress rehearsal!
An excerpt:
“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do, the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have.
It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem.
*It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would’ve been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
FYI: had I not said “yes” to that cup of coffee, I would not have met and later married my late husband.
To paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous quote (which was about fear) – *the mark of a good life is where there’s nothing to regret but regret itself.
In closing…the birth and death is what we inherit. But the dash? That’s ours. We could think of it as a Wi-Fi Signal: sometimes strong, sometimes spotty, but we’re all just trying to stay connected.
Make the middle count. How are you going to write your dash? Fill the dash with meaning!
Are you living a dashing life?
Girl Who Would be KING on Life, Style and INSPIRATION. 
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