Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Inside the Heart of This Quote
There are nights when you lie awake staring at the ceiling, the room dim and quiet, and you suddenly feel the weight of how short your life really is. Not in a dramatic way, just in that steady, honest way that makes you swallow hard and wonder what you are really doing with your days. That quiet tension is exactly where these words land: "Living and dying is not the big issue. The big issue is what you’re going to do with your time while you are here."
When you hear "Living and dying is not the big issue," you are first looking at the simple fact that you are born and one day you will stop breathing. It sounds almost casual, as if someone is shrugging at the two events that usually scare you the most. Under that calm surface is a challenge: being alive and knowing you’ll die is something you share with every other human. It is already decided for you. You do not have to earn your birth, and you cannot outrun your death. These words are nudging you away from staring only at those two fixed poles.
Then you reach "The big issue is what you’re going to do…" and suddenly the focus turns and points straight at you. Now the question is not what happens to you, but what moves you will choose. The phrase "what you’re going to do" makes your life sound like a piece of choreography, or a page still waiting for your handwriting. It carries a quiet demand: you are not just here to be carried along by your circumstances. You are, in some real way, responsible for how you meet them. I think this is the part many people try to dodge, because choice can feel heavier than fate.
Next comes "with your time…" which pulls everything into the present tense of your actual days. Time here is not some abstract idea; it is your commute, the slow scroll on your phone, the conversation you keep putting off, the book you say you’ll write "someday." You can almost feel the texture of a day passing, like warm light moving slowly across the floor and then disappearing. These words remind you that time is the true currency of your life. Every yes and every no is really about where your hours go. That can be sobering, but also strangely freeing: you may not control everything, but you always have at least some say over your attention, your effort, your presence.
Finally, "while you are here" grounds the whole quote in one small, definite span. You are not asked to plan for eternity, only for this stretch of years where you wake up, feel hunger, get tired, and laugh with someone now and then. It suggests that "here" is fragile and temporary, like being a guest in a place you do not own. You do not know how long you get to stay. There is tenderness in that reminder, because it makes your ordinary moments feel more precious, not less.
Imagine one simple scene: you are at your desk late, again, answering one more email that will be forgotten in three weeks. Outside, the street is quiet and you notice how the cool night air leaks in through a small gap in the window. In that second you realize this evening, this exact one, will never come back. The quote does not say you must quit your job or do something sensational. It only asks: is this really what you want to trade this unrepeatable evening for?
To be fair, there are limits. Sometimes life pins you down with obligations, illness, or other people’s choices, and your range of options shrinks. The quote can sound harsh if you hear it as "you should be doing something huge all the time." But it does not actually say that. It talks about what you are going to do, not how impressive it must look. Even on the hardest days, "what you do with your time" might simply be choosing patience over bitterness, reaching out to a friend, or allowing yourself to rest without shame. That still counts.
What stays with you, long after you hear these words, is this: you will live, and you will die; both are certain. The real story, the only part that is truly yours, is what you decide to fill the in-between with.
The Time and Place Behind the Quote
Bill T. Jones is a choreographer, director, and dancer who came of age in a turbulent, creative period in American history. Born in 1952, he grew up in the shadow of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam era, and a rapidly changing cultural landscape. Art, politics, identity, and the body were all being questioned and reshaped in public view.
By the time he was speaking words like these, the world had already watched generations wrestle with questions of purpose, justice, and mortality. The AIDS crisis had cut short many lives in the arts community, including those close to him. In that environment, life and death were not distant concepts; they were present, sometimes brutally so. When you live surrounded by both intense creativity and real loss, the question of what you do with the days you are given naturally sharpens.
These words make particular sense in a late-20th-century and early-21st-century context, where people were increasingly aware that longevity and comfort did not automatically produce meaning. You could have more technology, more options, more years — and still feel empty or directionless. Saying that living and dying is not the big issue pushes against a culture focused on extending life at all costs, or achieving surface success, and instead insists on a more intimate measure: how you actually use your time.
While this quote circulates widely in motivational settings, it fits deeply with Jones’s world: a world where the body is both fragile and expressive, and where time on stage — like time in life — is brief, charged, and entirely worth asking what you will do with it.
About Bill T. Jones
Bill T. Jones, who was born in 1952, is an American choreographer, director, and dancer whose work has powerfully blended movement, music, and social commentary for decades. He co-founded the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, a dance company known for its bold physicality and its willingness to confront subjects like race, identity, illness, and memory on stage. Growing up as a Black, gay man in the United States, he moved through worlds marked by both creative possibility and deep prejudice.
He is remembered not only for his groundbreaking choreography but also for his insistence that dance can carry complex stories and difficult truths. His pieces often ask audiences to face the realities of the body: strength, vulnerability, pleasure, pain, and mortality. That way of seeing the world is woven directly into the quote about living, dying, and what you do with your time.
For Jones, time on stage is limited: a performance begins, unfolds, and ends. That structure mirrors life itself, and it shapes his view that the real question is how you inhabit the moments you have. The urgency and clarity in his words grow out of a life spent making art under pressure, losing loved ones too soon, and still choosing to create. When he says the big issue is what you will do with your time while you are here, he is speaking as someone who has turned his own finite time into work that continues to move people long after the curtain falls.
