On my way to work one morning this week, I was listening to a story on NPR about a third grade teacher in LA and her chance meeting on an airplane—sitting next to a young soldier as he was preparing for deployment to Afghanistan. She talked to him, inquiring about his life and his training. After a lengthy conversation, they exchanged contact information, and the teacher had her young students send letters to the soldier while he was deployed. When he returned, he visited her and met her students, and now the two are like family. This story made me [once again] realize how deeply interconnected we all are.

We all spend our lives creating a beautiful and unique tapestry that tells our story. Each individual we encounter, every experience we have, each place we visit becomes a part of our lives and influences the greater whole of our identity. We are not only living our own tapestry, but we are contributing to that of others. And when you think of it that way, it is easy to visualize just how much—or how little—these pieces may contribute to the overall fabric. Some elements may be a thin strand woven into the overall piece. Or they may be such a major part of our lives that they are much of the background color.

My life is a fabric woven of chance encounters, momentary connections, and long-term friends and family; they all contribute to the beauty of the whole. They all contribute to who I am. My tapestry has incorporated positive and negative, intricately and inextricably woven together and connected to the lives of so many others.

Thread after thread after thread—various colors, shades, tensions, and textures—add richness of experience and interaction to the final product.

Someday, when I can more clearly see the greater whole as I look back over all of the things that made up my life, I will begin to see how the good and the bad, the momentous and the trivial were all necessary in adding depth and detail and richness to my life.

But for now, I’m going to work on making new connections and having new adventures so I can add a smattering of colorful threads. Then, when I look back over the whole, I can point to this time and say, “Right there–that is where I shook things up a bit!”

{Photo by Camille San Vicente on Unsplash}