ezra glenn: on people and the weight of the relationship between them
13 Jul 2017yesterday i had lunch with ezra and, as always, we had another one of our wide-ranging, free-wheeling, thought-generating conversations.
as i was sharing my evolutionary leadership experience with him, we dove pretty deep into a discussion about people and relationships. among many things, one particular part of our conversation went like this (i’m blending what both of us said):
[begin scene]
the relationship between two (or more) people, in some ways, is just as important as the individual people themselves. and when you bring two people together, it’s the added value of the relationship itself (the connection with just as much thingyness as the individual people themselves) that allows them to be more than the sum of their individual selves.
and, if you look at that trio is a certain way, the connection between two people may be the most important real, lasting part of the whole situation. people are always changing. in the relationship between, say, child and mom, the child (at whatever age) often wants to freeze the mom in memory. but in reality, the mom when the child was an infant has gone and passed away. the mom when the child was in college was different from the infant-mom, but she too is gone. and the same goes with the child.
so if anything is to be tended to, it’s the relationship between them. the people who they each were at any point in the past are already gone.
[end scene]
this gives new weight for me to what it means (and why it’s important) to maintain relationships. it also lifts some weight on the moment of biological death. when i see that the mom of my childhood no longer exists, it’s not so hard to understand that my mom as i see her will never last.
PHEW!
ps - somewhere in all of this is how the Trinity works.
words / writing / post-processing
310w / 13min / 7min