Last week I had the pleasure of taking a trip on our wonderful public transport – or ‘the peasant wagon’ as a bus driver friend of mine calls it. Luckily, the previous occupant of my seat had left a copy of the Metro newspaper, with which I whiled away my journey.

On this particular Thursday it’s regular ‘Five Questions For…’ article was an interview with Dustin Hoffman, and he used a phrase I’ve never heard before

but which I have now fallen in love with. He talked about ‘living your dash’.

The meaning behind this phrase is this: when you’ve popped your clogs they put two dates on your gravestone – the date on which you were born, and the date on which you died. Between these two figures is a dash. This dash represents your Life.

Of course this is nothing new – it’s just a rehash of the well known ‘life is short’ and ‘you only live once’ ethos. This idea is one that gets a lot of play in the WMD Guide and so it may appear as though I am merely repeating something that we’ve already discussed at length. But I think there’s something in this phrase which sums the idea up much better than any other we’ve used.

Picture your own gravestone. Obviously, unless you’re of a particularly morbid disposition (or, some may say, well prepared), this is something you will never actually see in real in life. But just try to see that image.

Imagining it from top to bottom, you first have your name. Under that are the dates as mentioned earlier, and beneath that are a string of platitudes that tell the world you were a loving father, grandfather, brother, son, husband, etc, etc. Out of all the scribblings on this monument to your existence, the only thing that really represents your Life – everything that makes you, you – is a little dash maybe an inch long.

When thought of in these terms your Life is merely a glorified scratch. If that’s not enough to make you

shit yourself into a realisation of the fleeting nature of the human experience then I don’t know what is.

Ok, so far this all sounds very depressing. If this is all Life amounts to then what can we possibly achieve. The answer? Anything.

Because in What Men Do terms, this sets us a challenge. The Purpose of our Lives is to make our dash the most significant inch of stone that has ever existed. Ok, so it’s only an inch long… but how deep is it? Is it merely a shallow scratch or

does it look more like a gaping canyon explored to the full?

Death may be a taboo subject but it is inevitable – that’s why it’s a dash not a line. And worrying what the date at the end of the dash will say is as futile as trying to change the date at the beginning of it.

So we concentrate on the dash and make sure that not a millimetre of it is wasted. And the truth is that if your dash is one bursting with Purpose (not to mention depth), you’ll probably find it has the result of pushing the last date a bit further away.

Out of interest I Googled the phrase (other search engines are available) and came across a poem written by Linda Ellis which ends:

So, when your eulogy is being read,
with your life’s actions to rehash…
would you be proud of the things they say
about how you spent your dash?

Well…would you?