Encounters and Connection

Encounters and Connection

John Paul Derryberry

Data from sources like Our World in Data indicate that the average person encounters or gets to know about 80,000 people over a 70-to-80-year lifespan. So at 44, I’m a little over halfway to 80, meaning I've probably encountered close to 50,000 people in my life. It’s an astonishingly large number to wrap our heads around. It's even more surprising that we connect so deeply with people as we move through life. Whether that connection is short-term or long-term, all connections and these encounters have end dates.  Yet these encounters and connections make up the story of our lives, shape us in profound ways, and determine our emotional stability, joy, happiness, and become the helpful hands we turn to in difficult times. Something I don't think we fully understand how essential the interactions are.

The question becomes: can we pick the right connections, and can we find the bravery to use them when we doubt ourselves, each other, and life in general? And probably, how do we know we picked the correct people to connect with? For this 44-year-old, it’s the ability of my strongest connections to bring peace, compassion, and passion to our interactions. A level of safety permeates our interactions, letting me be myself; I’m free from judgement if I decide to improve myself or adjust my life while staying true to my moral and ethical standards—the ability to show up, to sacrifice some of their space for mine, and vice versa. Curiosity and the attempt to understand come well before judgment hits, and if judgement does arrive, it lands in a way that makes me think about the topic in new ways.

Almost every fall, I invite my people to my house to hang out for a night, to keep the long flame of our relationship alive. It continues our encounters and connections with a group I have known for more than two decades. Maybe it lowers the total number of people I interact with in my life, but it always feels fuller this way.  It's another chapter in our encounters and connection, one that puts life, my actions, and how I want to navigate it into perspective.  As a storyteller, it’s the idea that my life story will have woven my characters into a grand story of always reconnection, the idea that friendship and those closest to you deserve a full life that, when we sit somewhere and look back upon it, hopefully in our very old age, it’s a story worth revisiting again and again.

In our ever-more-connected world, many believe the next encounter is the best one, and that deepening the current connection isn't the way to find oneself.  I've never found any evidence that navigating life that way leads to truth. We find meaning after a deep dive of introspection. For that to happen, we need a space filled with people who understand that encounters and connections aren't about sheer numbers, but about the bravery and courage to examine ourselves again and again with roughly the same group, as life naturally unfolds.