Connections: aren’t they what life is about—experiences, moments, depths shared with another? What is life absent meaningful engagement with the souls that surround us? Why are we struck differently by one than another? How do we learn if we do not seek, respond and act in affect to natural draws?
Maybe the draw is something. Maybe it is nothing, but how do we know if we are not present and engaging to understand? What is it of another that touches something in ourselves? Is it all imagined? Is it real?
Be open. Share. Seek. Expect nothing and still give. Give for no other reason than that you want create a possibility that another may just see, and in that, perhaps a connection starts. Maybe the connection is a moment. Maybe moment becomes a lifetime. Maybe it grows and becomes reading, learning, understanding every of the other’s thoughts, hopes, and dreams.
Maybe moment is only a look, a moment of witness—fleeting and forever haunting for reasons undefined. Every connection is different, and it is the difference that makes each special, personal, breathes into them living experience beyond ephemerality without affect.
I do not believe connections can be forced. To seek and will a falsity of spirit that is not there begets frustration in misplaced for what, in spite of all effort, still eludes.
I believe connections we find in life either are or become. Of connections that are, we find them, connection and draw present and expressed by each from the beginning. They are easy, natural, and are of the find we stumble upon as if they were waiting, destined, for us to find.
Connections that become, these take time. They require effort, but unlike bonds that are of force, they do not hold and keep by will but by reciprocation and answering of another’s free will. For a connection to become, we must live present continuing to give and express of ourselves in simple giving—thoughts, spirit, words—gifts which take cost little more of ourselves than living true as who we are so another may then see.
Maybe we are overlooked. Maybe we are dismissed, but just as we (or I) discern God touch and change our hearts—open sight to what, before, we did not see—perhaps we too may be witnessed by another in like way. What was not there before, in after-affect becomes.
The longer I live, the greater I hold gratitude for the connections in my life. Most are not of friendships sought and desired for attainment in younger years. They are connections gifted to me as God’s willed in the timing, living, and presence of this experience God as given.
God is in the small ever as much as in the grand, and I believe this especially true in the connections we share in the living of our everydays: friendships and relationships that, in simply sharing presence—thoughts, words, and spirit—our worlds and days are bettered.
Whether connections always were or, in living, did become, I am grateful for all that are.