In 2017, I found myself visiting a country for the first time. It was only my third time away from home, and while I wanted to explore the local restaurants, my colleagues were too busy to come along. I kept stalling and waiting as time went by. Then someone said to me, “You won’t go anywhere in life if you can’t walk alone.” Those words were all I needed to step out. Looking back, the moment was less about food and more about learning how to exist on my own.
That experience has stayed with me because it connects to so many things we are told about people and relationships. We hear that if you walk alone, you go fast, but if you walk with others, you go far. We hear that no man is an island. We are also told that people come into our lives for a reason, a season or a lifetime. These ideas can seem to contradict each other at times and overlap at others, but they all feel true at different points in our lives, whether in personal relationships or professional connections.
Thinking about this makes me reflect on time and how quickly it moves. One minute we have people around us, and the next minute we lose them to death, conflict, priority switches or simply growing apart. At the same time, there are encounters that never turn into anything more. No matter how hard we try, we cannot enter some people’s worlds and no matter how much others try, they cannot enter ours. This is true in personal relationships and professional connections alike. It makes me wonder if these missed encounters mean more than we think.
Maybe every rejection is a form of protection. Maybe when we are rejected, God is protecting us from certain people and when we reject others, He is protecting them too. Or maybe some paths are simply not meant to cross in a meaningful way. Not every encounter is meant to become a connection, and maybe that is not something to take personally but something to accept, whether in personal relationships or professional connections.
The truth is that life is full of uncertainty. The only thing that seems certain is death, a process we will all go through. In between, there are people we will get to say goodbye to and others we may never even get the chance to say hi to. All we can do is live freely by showing up fully for the personal relationships and professional connections that matter while letting go of the ones we cannot control. We can only be present for as long as we walk this earth and trust that the rest will fall into place.