21st November 2024
Recently we lost a very dear friend to an illness which lasted only some months which made me once again realise the transient nature of life and how someone so cheerful and jovial, someone who always made everyone smile & laugh with his jokes would just vanish not to be met again.
Reflecting on the experience later, I was struck by one thing:
The message for his final prayer had his year of birth and year of death, with a simple Dash in between.
And during the prayer meeting, I couldn’t get the tiny dash off my mind.
This was not out of the ordinary, Go to any graveyard in the world and you will find thousands of gravestones with the same simple marking with a dash in between.
That dash holds everything.
Every ounce of a person’s life captured in that single, small, insignificant line.
Every hope, Every dream. Every success and failure, Every heartbreak and struggle.
Every fear, stress, and joy. The seasons of love and the seasons of loss.
All of it, An entire life, Everything held in a single dash.
On the surface, it’s tragic. Yet somehow, elegant, perfect—the complexities of life distilled into something so beautifully simple.
The experience sparked one idea I can’t stop thinking about:
Make the dash count.
The Dash contains all that you have done & left undone,
All that was said & left unsaid,
All that was achieved and not pursued,
All that you did out of kindness & All the time you made people feel bad & unloved,
All those you forgave & All those you did not.
All that is finally contained in that little dash;
For it matters not how much we own – the cars, the house, the businesses, the cash but what matters is howcwe live and love and how we spend our dash.
Make that dash count & Stay blessed forever.