When I was completing my master’s degree, our professor would always talk about living your dash – which was perhaps a not so elegant way to talk about how we choose to spend the time between our date of birth and our date of death.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of my father’s passing, and it has me thinking about how he lived his dash, and how all of us live our dashes. My dad was fierce. He was courageous. He was resilient. He was unhinged at times. I can also now appreciate how much of the time he was terrified and didn’t want to show it, so he would hide behind bravado and big, bold, (sometimes destructive) actions.
He loved as fiercely as he lived. He was direct. He valued honesty, even though he struggled to be honest with himself. And he actually had a wicked sense of humour. He was kind. He didn’t always know the right way to show that he cared, and yet, I sensed that he did. He was eager to share his opinions – which I now appreciate, is how men share about who they are and what they believe. I wish I had known this before he died, because I would probably have appreciated his opinions more, and I would have been less annoyed at him for so often interjecting his opinions. I now see how that was him showing his love and his care, and my heart hurts every time I think of how often I missed his attempts at showing that he cared.
When I consider this idea of living one’s dash, I think about this innocent boy who came into this world with so much love and joy in his heart, and who walked through so much pain in his life. I think about how the world can bend us out of shape and make us forget who we are. How some experiences in life can sometimes make us armour up, and how hard it is to stay open when we have experienced so much abuse and disappointment.
I think about the boy who became a man who was trying to prove himself and believed he had to work hard to earn love and respect. I think about a boy who grew up without a male role model in his life. I think about the man who didn’t know how to be responsible and how to show up as a partner and as a father.
I think about the man who failed over and over, and somehow, always found the courage to begin again. No failure was ever too big to overcome. I have said this many times, my father was one of the most resilient people I ever met, and I know that that is probably where I got my drive and resilience from. It was modeled to me all my life, that we don’t give up, we just begin again, and we try harder. And try he did. Always. Right until the end. He did not leave this life without a fight.
I am still amazed at his physical strength and stamina. What I admire the most is his courage to stop drinking after almost a lifetime of addiction. His courage to, once again, begin again. Saying no to alcohol changed the direction of his “dash” in the final eight years of his life. Getting to know who he was when he was sober, was such a gift, because it added nuance and colour to the picture I had of who he was. I discovered that he could be gentle. And his kindness was more transparent.
My father taught me about being willing to risk it all. He taught me about not holding back. And in his final years of life, he taught me what it looked like when someone chose to have enough. In the last two years of his life, I saw a man who was grateful for the simple things in life, and who was far more aware of how finite time was, and of how much we have to be grateful for.
And so, I’m reflecting on this whole dash business. We all have a limited number of days on this earth. We arrive open – pure love, pure joy, pure innocence – and within a few short years, we have conditioned ourselves to be afraid, to be doubtful, to sometimes even shut down or be cruel. We forget who we are, and we can spend so much of our time struggling to try and find our way back to who we are. Some of us never find our way back. I don’t think my father ever did.
And yet, even if we never find our way back to who we are, or we spend our lives struggling and raging, we are still whole. Our essence remains within us. Do we get bruised along the way? Absolutely. Are we ever irreversibly broken? Never. Every human being has the capacity to return to wholeness. It’s available, and it requires of us. It requires the strength and willingness to examine our wounds, and choose to disrupt survival patterns we had forged over years of making our way through life. It requires the courage to reclaim what was lost, and to begin again, no matter how messed up we believe our lives might be.
Before I started working with my coach, I was lost. I had made my fair share of mistakes. I had caused pain to those I loved. I was living like a whirlwind of chaos – reeling from the pain of over 30 years of abuse. And yet, it took one person who believed in me. One person who did not treat me as if I was broken, to begin to turn all of that around.
One loving presence allowed me to find the courage to heal and to begin to reclaim what was lost. I don’t imagine I will ever reclaim all of it, and I’m grateful for my dash – my time here on this earth. I’m grateful for every mistake. Every failure. Every win. Every moment of joy or wonder. I’m grateful that I got to love and be loved. I’m grateful that I got to be scared and courageous. That I got to be messy, and sometimes elegant and graceful. That I got to experience the heights of joy and aliveness, and the depths of despair, grief, and sorrow. I’m grateful for the lessons leant from grief and for the ways that Life has cracked me open, and invited me to really look at myself, and to consciously choose who I want to be as I make my way through this life.
I want to leave you with this message: I believe in you. I believe that no matter how far you have moved away from who you are, no matter how lost you might feel, no matter how many times you have fucked up and failed, you are still whole. You are still worthy. You can still change the direction of that dash. You can reclaim the parts of you that were lost along the way. And even if you don’t, you are creating your legacy right now. You will be remembered for something someday. Why not consciously choose what that is?
If you want to be more intentional about living your dash, and you feel like you don’t even know where to begin, I’m here. Let’s talk. Let’s explore what it might mean to shift from merely surviving into truly thriving. It’s your birth right to thrive. It’s what Life intends for you. You only need to have the courage to choose it.