Read more: Passing Connections in Life

It’s amazing how people pass in our lives. In and out, through and through, side to side – people come and they go in miraculous ways.

This realization struck me as I was travelling. The night before, I discovered my aunt and uncle were flying in from Alaska at the same time, in the same airport, as I was departing for my Seattle flight. In and of itself, this isn’t miraculous/ But the undercurrent of it is: we live in two different places, in the vicinity of three major airports. But here we were: brushing against one another as we shifted realities. For my aunt and uncle, a seismic shift back into mundanity after a week in the Alaskan wilds. For me, a gentle departure to a new place, for a new chapter.

We underestimate this: how we seamlessly pass each other in unexpected ways. Sometimes physically – in airports, on highways – and other times in life phases, emotions. Sometimes we cross one another without quite meeting. Aligning. We are close – on the tip of connection – but we just miss each other.

That’s been a theme in my own life lately: how people enter and leave but cannot stay. Cannot align. Cannot meet you where you are. This doesn’t make them villainous, or monstrous, or any of the malign things. It makes them human.

Most often, this arrives in relationships. Two people cross. They talk. They connect. But they don’t align. They don’t meet. Not really. They could seemingly be on the same page with most things in their connection, but something is still missing. Lost. When that happens, they can’t make it work, no matter how hard they try. And they do try. At least one of them.

That is a pressing theme in my own life. With friends, love interests. There is this element of passing – of being with each other without being able to meet one another. Of always walking to the thresholds between two lives and asking – begging – the other person to meet you there. To enter your world. To… be. But they can’t. They stop. They stall. They gap at you from their own world with eyes wide open and a hand half-extended, frozen in their own indecision.

Once, that was enough for me – to be a possibility, even if they couldn’t meet me.

Not anymore.

That is the thing about growth: once it happens, you cannot renege after you see it. When you evolve, you cultivate roots that embed deeply in yourself, your habits, and your soul. They grow, and they soar, and they anchor. Not all at once, but gradually, like that slow-growing plant on your back porch. You watch it – day after day – for growth, but you don’t see it until two months later. Maybe three. But then, one day, there it is: tall, flowery, and yours. You can’t unsee its growth. You can only see its truth. And that is the truth about these passing connections: want cannot fully meet you cannot align with who you’ve become.

And that is the great tragedy: choosing your own growth means abandoning the connections that cannot meet you. Sometimes, it’s the old friend you’ve known since grade school who you gave and gave to but couldn’t give back. Other times, it’s that captivating man with dark eyes and the shy smile who looks at you like sunshine but cannot tell you how he feels. Cannot meet you.

And you deserve someone who meets you. In every lifetime.

So, it is funny – how we pass each other. Less like ships in the night, and more like the sea and the sky. Vast and separate, but able to nearly reach one another at the right time, the right place – just where the sun seemingly sinks into the sea.

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