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I have been thinking about the complexity of human connections and relationships. Not only the ones that are closer to us in our families and close friends, but those that are seemingly ordinary and often perceived as unimportant. The connections we make at work, school, clubs, and the places we frequent.
And I have been thinking about this because, as you may already know, I recently left a job that I loved. On my last day, as we held a small farewell party in the chaplain’s office, a couple of nurses from the oncology unit I was supporting showed up with the poster you see here. It was not a secret how much I loved my work in that unit. As they trickled in, they told me a favorite memory of my work with patients and I told them, too, how much I admired their labor of love and care.
Other people came to say goodbye, too. A colleague asked me how I felt about being the center of attention and I explained to him that I did not feel as such. On the contrary, I felt that I was given the opportunity to lay my eyes on the faces of people I enjoyed interacting with during my time there.
I cried, some of them cried. I left the office with gifts and notes from people. I loved this job. It has been one of the most rewarding and beautiful jobs I have done. This job transformed me in very profound ways. I am not the same person that I was three years ago. But the most beautiful part of this is that my being is now imprinted with the mark of the love and wisdom of others.
Allowing ourselves to be open to the beauty of human connection will do this. The connections we make are not ordinary nor insignificant. They may be temporary, because everything about being alive is temporary, but not lacking value for that reason. Have you been impacted by the presence of someone in your life who left a profound teaching or shared their wisdom with you? By witnessing their struggle and feeling your heart opening up to them to offer care and companionship for a moment?
I used the word complexity because the impact of our exchanges with people is not often clear to us. A person giving you a ride home when you were stranded, or the one that made you upset when they cut you off or misunderstood you. Our interactions with others shape us. We do not live in silos and unaffected, we exist in a web of connections and disconnections that shape our understanding of the world and our way of showing up in it.
On my last day a co-worker said to me, with a tone of melancholy, “Connections, we make them and leave them.”
“Yes”, I said “and they also make us in the process”
“That’s true, that’s true” he replied.
The web of us is the tapestry of our lives interwoven with the lives of others, even if briefly. We carry within us the moments of connections with other humans. They influence our being in the world and our being with other people. In my conversations with people, they would often share stories of how some stranger helped them in a time of need, they would also share the wisdom they carried from people they loved, they would mention a co-worker that taught them some specifically, or they would share their insights from observing the care they were receiving from the medical team.
Our interactions with the world and others are mutual, whether we are aware of this or not. Our brains evolved to create connections and as people show up into our lives more than once they are mapped into our lives; some in more prominent ways than others. There is a mysterious happening in the spaces between us that often escapes our awareness in the moment, but its fruits revealed to us in retrospect.
Connections, we make them and we leave them. We leave them but we are not intact. In the process, we are made, marked and, sometimes, profoundly transformed by them.
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