We Are Connected in Ways We Never Can Predict

We Are Connected in Ways We Never Can Predict

The other day I received a personal letter in my mailbox. Even that, a real etter in these days of emails and cell phones and hasty, haphazard communication, was in itself a simple treasure, something I can savor and save and re-read.

I am a retired high school English teacher, and the letter was from a former student who graduated from high school in 1974 in Anchorage, Alaska. That would make him about 50 years old today. He lives in Florida these days, and I now live in Washington state. I even have a different last name than I did when he was in my class.

He was writing to tell me he regretted stealing a knife from my former husband’s sporting goods store. I had recommended him for the part time job which ended when he was caught stealing the knife.

I’m sure I was disappointed in him at the time, maybe a little embarrassed that I couldn’t have predicted such an indiscretion. I probably concluded that he was a kid who did a foolish thing he probably regretted. And I forgot about the incident. And about him.

But he never forgot.

There are rarely “do-overs” in life, but there are always “make betters.” Besides, most times what we wish we could do over are those events which ultimately make us better. A 17 year old boy in Alaska, who stole a knife from his English teacher’s former husband, becomes a 49 year old man, a successful engineer, a devoted husband and loving father to two young daughters, a man of conscience who tracks down and mails a letter to his retired teacher. He needed to apologize and to tell me that mistake became a benchmark in his life which brought the right choice into focus whenever he made a tough decision. “The remembrance of that time,” he wrote, “when I sold my integrity for the price of a knife, has always led me to the higher path.”

His letter is a testimony to the power of impressions and memory, character and connection. It made me think about those invisible strings which bind us in memory to people even when we may not know it. A thread still connects Bob and me, tangled through 31 years of the accomplishments and failures, the joys and sorrows, the people and places of our separate lives, a connection I could not have predicted. It was important to him that I know the kind of man he is now. I am honored that my knowing this mattered to him. That was the true gift of his letter.

We human beings are all connected, and it is this interconnectedness that defines our humanity: our need to share our personal stories, our need to love and to be loved, our need to matter and to be remembered, our need to forgive and to be forgiven.