"The Dash" by Linda Ellis

When I was in first-year high school, Bro. Jim Dunne, SJ, came into our classroom and wrote this on the board: "Life is what you do while you're waiting to die."

It sounds rather morbid for high school boys, but it's very true. He wanted us to think about how we would spend that time. Would we waste it or make it count?

Anyway, I remembered this because I just received an email that I would normally ignore. The email had a link to a "movie" based on a poem—"The Dash" by Linda Ellis—that focused on the "dash" between the date of birth and the date of death that usually appears on tombstones. A little Googling led me to the following:

Poem - Read the words as you listen to the author read the poem
Movie - Read the poem with images and background music
Song - Listen to a sample of the poem turned into a song
Story - Read and/or listen to how the author came to write the poem

It's probably good to reflect once in a while on the "dash" to which our lives will eventually be reduced.


Thanks to Weng Meneses for the email =)