An ode to transient connection

Today I am thinking about the afternoon I spent walking through Madrid. I ended up on a park bench, sitting next to three young people in the only sliver of sunlight still hitting the lawn between two buildings in downtown. They offered me a beer, and I drank one while listening to them strum “Big Yellow Taxi” on their guitar as we took in the last minutes of light.

“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone…”

I never got their names. So many times this would happen while traveling: meeting someone briefly, having a magical moment together, and then going on your way — never bothering with the details of names or work or contact information. Instead we would just say “cheers” before disappearing, knowing and accepting that you will never see each other again.

Transient connections like these created some of the most beautiful moments of my life. Of course, the most obvious examples are those with such an unmistakable romance that they took on the costume of falling in love. There was that motorcycle ride through the mountains outside a small town in Columbia, under a navy blue dusk sky, with a man I had met the night before while dancing. That evening at a Brooklyn bar serving strong margaritas when I thought to be having one the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life. The night it began pouring rain while camping on an island alone with a man I met in Havana, how we rushed to our hammock, placed a thick wool blanket over ourselves and kissed gently all night as the raindrops pattered against our bodies.

Other times, these connections taught me something I couldn’t have learned or come across otherwise. In Havana, I ate a midday lunch with an elder woman, who cooked me chicken and plantains and told me stories of the revolution, how the U.S. government murdered the love of her life. While hiking in the Himalayas, a woman I hiked with told me about a Buddhism retreat that would later begin my six-year (and still going) interest in meditation. While wine-tasting in Peru with a woman from Israel, she shared about the night two men violently robbed her in Central America. She is still a woman I think about whenever I reflect on assault.

But most often, when I reflect back now on these moments, I actually can’t articulate what I “got” from these interactions. As that famous quote says, I hardly remember what was specifically said or done, but I simply remember deeply how each person made me feel.

​During my periods of intense travel, these kinds of connection felt so simple and beautiful, like the epitome of being present and living in the moment. How exciting to experience such heightened emotion with a person, and have that moment exist on its own, without entanglements. It made me think of the line by Paulo Coelho in his book The Alchemist: “We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.”

I’m thinking more about transient connection these days because even now more “settled” in Oakland, these moments still happen: I spent nine days hiking in New Mexico with strangers, then came home. Someone I dated briefly in Mexico came to visit for a week, and then left. As a single woman now, dating itself becomes a consistent exercise in valuing connection even when it does not last: on so many nights, I share something beautiful with a stranger — and then never see them again.

As I get older now, I do find myself craving deeper and deeper intimacy, rather than this collection of intense yet singular moments. When I think about my greatest desires now, the first phrase that comes to mind is “to build.” 

And yet….I still can’t bring myself today to discount transient connection entirely. I still can’t deny its magic, the important role these moments have played — and continue to play — in my life. 

In Buddhism, there is a belief in the impermanence of all things, which means Buddhists technically believe all connection is actually transient. Any brief moment we manage to connect together — share a laugh, resonate with each other’s story, for one second deeply understand each other — is inherently singular, incapable of being replicated. I am not the same person today I will be tomorrow. The people I meet will not be either. We will never be those same two people having that moment again. By tomorrow, everything will have already changed. 

I once told someone that this may be the closest thing to God I ever could describe — me, another person, and a moment when the universe vibrated the same way for both of us, the certainty in that energy of both finding something at exactly the moment we needed it, before tomorrow when it’s gone. 

Seven years ago, I soaked in the last seconds of sunlight in a park in Madrid, giggling with strangers as they strummed their guitar. Two months ago, I camped by a river listening to women of color share stories of their families — stories that, for the first time, resembled my own. In April, I spent an afternoon letting a woman run her fingers through my hair, as we lay in my backyard, beneath the tree that had just sprouted leaves again for Spring.We will never be those same people again — laughing, listening, laying, understanding each other. This was our precious moment, our parenthesis in eternity, our few gifted seconds vibrating with the universe — a brief magic I still feel grateful for every time it comes.