Where paths cross

Every so often, an ordinary moment turns out to be about something else entirely.

I watched two women meet outside a grocery store recently. Neither seemed to know the other. One had dropped a bag, oranges rolling across the wet pavement, and the other bent down without a word to help gather them. It took maybe 40 seconds. They exchanged a few sentences I couldn’t hear, laughed once, and went their separate ways. I don’t think either of them thought about it again.

I did, though. I kept thinking about how neither woman had planned to meet the other that morning. Their separate mornings happened to touch for less than a minute, and then continued on, changed by some small amount neither could probably name.

For a long time, when I thought about what brings people together, bridges were the image that came to mind. Bridges connect two known sides. They’re built on purpose, toward a destination already identified. I still believe in that kind of work. Deliberate bridges, built with intention toward a place meant to be reached, matter enormously.

But most of what actually connects us doesn’t look like that. It looks more like the oranges on the pavement. Two paths, going nowhere near each other, happened to cross, and neither woman built that crossing or saw it coming.

We don’t choose most of what brings us to a moment like that. We inherit the road itself: our history, our circumstances, the things we were handed before we had any say in the matter. But somewhere along that inherited road, we do choose. Whether to stop when someone drops their oranges, or to walk past.

It’s easier to write about the pleasant version of this. Strangers and oranges. A good conversation with someone who turns out to see the world the way you do. But I find it’s the other moments that test something in us. The harder version is, I have found, the one when the person who arrives holds something you find genuinely difficult — a belief you can’t share, a history that collides with your own. That kind of crossing doesn’t resolve into a nice moment. Sometimes it just sits there, unfinished, both people a little unsettled by having met at all. That’s the harder kind of clearing, the one that doesn’t resolve so much as ask something of us.

I’ve been wondering whether that discomfort is a sign the meeting failed, or a sign it worked exactly as these moments do. Nothing about a chance crossing ever promised that the two people would agree, or even like each other. It’s just a clearing, the place where two paths became visible to each other for a moment. What happens next, whether curiosity survives the discomfort or curls back toward the road already known, isn’t given. That part is chosen, over and over, usually without much notice.

Some of the most important clearings, I’ve come to think, aren’t between two people at all. Sometimes you’re walking along, certain of something, and a sentence in a book or an old memory resurfacing at an odd angle stops you in your tracks. You meet an earlier version of your own thinking and realize it doesn’t quite hold anymore. No one else needs to be present for that to count. Maybe it counts more, because there’s no one there to perform curiosity for. You either stay with it or you don’t.

When I think of it, there’s no need to choose between bridges and clearings, as though we had to decide which is the right way to create opportunities for people to come together. Bridges remain a valuable option for the places we mean to go and the connections worth building on purpose. Clearings, on the other hand, may allow for something else — the crossings that were never on any map and happened anyway.

What stays with me about the two women and the oranges isn’t the moment itself. It’s that neither of them will likely remember it by next week. It happened, and something, however small, passed between two lives that would otherwise never have touched. And, as someone who just happened to be watching, it turns out something happened to me too.

I don’t think we get to plan for many moments like that. I think we mostly just get to notice when we’re standing in one.

I’ve come to treasure those ordinary moments where simple things lead us to wonder. To curiosity. Some of what gets planted there, we may even see grow.

Carina Blumgrund writes from Winnipeg. Some of her essays appear in the recently published community anthology More Than You Give.