Meetings

image from Commons Wikimedia (Crowds - 2005 Melbourne Show {{Fir0002 20D}})

Sometimes I imagine that each of us will spend a lifetime in a significant relationship (whether "good" or "bad") with every person with whom we come in contact. Contact can be defined as loosely as seeing or speaking to another person or glimpsing them as they pass you in a vehicle on the highway. Isn't it remarkable, after all, to be alive in the same span of years as another person? Given all of the years of human history, to be born in an overlapping time is, in and of itself, significant - is it not?

Pierre Theilhard DeChardin, the Jesuit priest and philosopher, in his book, On Love and Happiness, says something akin to this when he writes, "That, among some thousands of human beings, the eyes of two individuals should meet is in itself a remarkable and precious coincidence: what, then, can we say when it is two minds that meet?"