Lent [Day 22]: Excerpts from the Notebook

Originally written Spring 2010. Perhaps just as relevant this Spring.

So, looking back in my collections of ephemeral notes today, I found this on a folded scrap of yellow legal paper:

"When do you realize that someone is going to change your life forever?"

Which is simultaneously deep and introspective and pithy Hallmark schlock.  Let's focus on the former.  It's sort of like the question of when life begins. (After all, relationship is very much a living being.  It also raises more questions than answers.)  Is it at conception?  Once the fetus is viable?  Upon its first breath of air?  When can you realize whether someone is going to make a profound impact on you?  When do you realize you have borne life into a relationship you've created?  At hello?  Later on, once you are clearly invested in relationship?  Is it even you who creates the relationship?  And when can you realize whether you are going to make a profound impact on someone else?  For me, that comes far earlier than the answer to the initial question.

In some Schrodinger fashion, we change each others' lives just by being in them.  Our presence changes the experiment.

I realized this morning, that I am embarking on some new relationships, and that these people will always be mine.  At some future date, they will move out of my immediate presence (or I theirs).  But even so, they will always be present in my life, in some form.  To quote an inappropriate Third Eye Blind song, "I guess I'll always be knowing you."  I don't think of relationships as necessarily having expiration dates.  They don't die, they just sort of go dormant in some form, like seeds in the Atacama that wait years for rain to coax them out to life.  So my recognition today that these relationships are, actually, going to be mine forever is more an acknowledgment than a revelation.  I think this acknowledgment has come earlier than it has in the past.  Or maybe I always somehow knew it, I'm just conscious of it earlier.  It's one of those things that is easy to pinpoint in hindsight than in the present.  It's easy to see evidence when you look back for it, even if the significance of a moment escapes you at that moment.