As humans, we are story. We are the story of our birth and our death. We are the story of what we love and what repels us. We are the story of our truths and our lies. We are the story of all the places we have lived and the places we have left behind. We are the story of home and exile and journey, of our hopes, dreams, our successes and failures. The story of each of our lives is held by the circles of people we have known and traveled with from our first breath to our last.

I was reminded so clearly of this last week when I met up with a friend from college…a friend I had not seen in several decades. Though we each had a general sense of one another’s life story from Christmas letters and now Facebook, the story by which we know one another was situated in those four years of intense living, learning and evolving that takes place in the close proximity of dorm living and college explorations. Our meeting found us remembering the highs and lows of that often turbulent time. We laughed and told the story, not always with consistent memory, of those days before we were launched into the totality of adulthood. The story that we held together represented only a glimpse of our life and where we are now. We talked of the people who made up that circle that knew us and helped us write the scenes that made up that particular act of our play. Some we had kept in touch with and others were stranded forever in the experiences we had once shared.

There are circles of people that hold us for a season and then release us to the ‘what next’. Sometimes those that make up the circle hold a thread that continues to connect and be woven into our next chapter and other times they let go and we all travel on. After this experience with my college friend, I have been thinking of those circles that have held my story. Circles of family…of friends…of teachers…of neighbors…of children and elders…of trusted ones and those that have betrayed trust…circles made up of those who have encouraged, others who have questioned, challenged. So many circles throughout any given life. But all help us write, tell and remember our story that is ever changing and emerging throughout however many days and years we are blessed to continue to walk this Earth.

Meeting with my college friend also impressed upon me how we can never know the totality of anyone’s story. Even those with whom we share the greatest intimacy and life experience have some secret part of themselves that will always remain that…secret. To know this creates a certain open heartedness in me. The circles that hold us harbors a part of knowing but none holds the fullness. As my friend and I shared many things that had happened to us over the years, part of us still really saw it all through our 21year old eyes which was sweet and lovely. That was the part of the other that we most truly knew. From that place, we held out to one another the fragments of some of what has happened since those precious years as a kind of offering, hoping to fill in the missing pieces of a now much fuller life.

As humans, we are story. Fragile, broken, triumphant, soaring story. It is with this lens that I want to greet each person I meet knowing that I can never…never…know the fullness of their story. All I can do in any brief or long encounter is to hold their life with a gentleness and reverence it deserves as their living moves their story farther along. As the wise, spiritual teacher Ram Dass says: “ We are all just walking each other home.”

And in that walking, wouldn’t we all want to have companions who hold our lives, our story, in a circle of care and compassion that is nothing short of sacred?

I think so. I think so.