One of the biggest factors into my wellbeing upon my return is the joy I feel when I am able to show up for people in my life. There are people who have seen me through my worst and my best, my extraordinary moments, the mundane and the painful. They appeared in my life when I was barely growing into myself, at a time when I started to understand who I wanted to be. They knew me when I was much less of a person than I am now.
These are the people who stay in my life by virtue of a shared story: a conscious philosophy towards the future, bound by the weight of a common history.
Yesterday, I attended the wedding of one of these people:
I have known Audrey for roughly six years – most of that time I was away. Due to our busy schedules, we hardly have time to hang out even if we were both in the same city. She’s one of the first people I’ll call upon when I am back, and she would do the same when she visited SF. It is that knowing right from the beginning, that we belong to the same life-long tribe.
Despite the lack of frequency, we have found rare long stretches of time to connect deeply, and I have somehow managed to get to know her parents, her brothers, her co-workers, and her partner, who is now her newly-minted husband, among the wide common network of friends we already share. I didn’t even realize I know and am known by such an extension of her until I was at her wedding. It was a poignant, conscious observation I had. Isn’t it such a beautiful thing to be connected to another person and exist in that overlapping web of complex, intricate, human connections?
After the wedding, I was inspired to look through my photo archive, and I was just overwhelmed by what it feels like to be part of someone’s life to be part of their major milestones, and what it feels like to have them for mine, how it feels like to witness milestones among the same tribe of people.
One of these was Min’s wedding where Audrey served as her bridesmaid, and now I feel like I must have done something right in my previous lifetimes to attend the weddings of two very dear and amazing people in my life. How much we have grown, how far we have come, how far we have to go, how blessed we are to walk some of that long, winding path, together.