“We meet no ordinary people in our lives.”

C. S. Lewis

**Patient information has been modified and or anonymized in keeping with respect for privacy**

We cross paths with strangers every day. Who have you crossed paths with? Did you even notice?

Countless thousands of souls brush against us in our lives, yet most go unseen, the blindness of routine and bustle pulling a veil over our eyes. But sometimes, that soul reaches out and grabs our attention—sometimes, even our hearts.

On a recent night shift I had the pleasure of a meeting a man who reminded me of my late grandfather, and who reminded me yet again of something I take for granted despite all the death and dying I’ve been around over the last ten years. This elderly man was bedridden, suffering from severe Parkinson’s and neuropathy, and his wife was doing her best to care for him. He’d simply slid out of bed and needed a lift assist—something we as paramedics do often. I remember walking through their house, a place cluttered with undone tasks that bespoke how far behind they were falling due to their ailing health. I remember his face; the vacant expression that is the hallmark of Parkinson’s, as well as the tremor and difficult speech. My grandfather was much like that, too.

Papa. A good man. A kind man. A man I failed to appreciate until he was gone.

We made sure he wasn’t injured and then lifted him back into his bed. I learned from his wife that he was doing physio exercises and trying his best to walk again. I remember the determination with which he spoke about it. He wanted to get better. Despite his age and his complicated medical history, despite the odds stacked high against him, he wanted to live. We all do.

It was a short encounter, no more than forty minutes, and soon we would be back on the road going wherever we were needed. While my partner made quick out to the idling ambulance, I stayed behind and said my goodbyes. I did my best to be upbeat, even cracking a few jokes (he had already made a few humorous remarks while we were assessing and lifting him), and though my patient’s face remained blank due to his disease, I think there was a smile there. God knows people can find humor even in the midst of suffering. In fact, we need to. Life is brutal and tragic and difficult. We have to be able to laugh at it.

We have to make fun, even as we die.

However routine this experience was, the likeness of my grandfather gave it a finality that sticks with me still. I knew that I would likely never meet this man again. And I also knew that his suffering was likely to get worse. As I shook his hand and wished him the best—and God bless him, as he wished me the best—I felt a curious melancholy, a longing for something I couldn’t name. It happens in moments like that, when I am torn away from all my petty worries and pride, when I am not blind to life. This existential longing is something C. S. Lewis wrote about aptly:

“We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering… For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”

Sometimes the people we meet open our eyes to life, to longing, and to the unknown yearnings of our human hearts. I understand so little about myself, but I know this: something within me is desperately seeking, and I catch whispers of that unnamable something whenever life breaks through the carapace of numbing routine and reminds me of the magnitude of the inseparable journeys we call living and dying.

The lesson in this is that the seemingly irrelevant paths we cross have the potential to be precious. Yes, the ones we ignore all the time in the often meaningless bustle of our lives. The strangers we meet, let alone our friends and family, carry a potential gift every time we share the same transient moment.

Go through your day with that in mind. When you cross paths with someone you don’t know, think to yourself, “I might never meet this person again.”

First, let it reduce your fear of embarrassment, judgment, or whatever that person thinks of you.

Second, let it inform your behavior with kindness. You were both born into this world, have met in a miracle of chance amongst billions of people, and very likely you won’t meet before you both have become the soil that nurtures the trees. One day, soon enough, you will both be dead and gone. Life has crossed your paths, and how much luck there is involved in that! Do not waste it. Even if it’s just a smile, or a small bit of everyday humor, you can make that glimpse of time meaningful for someone whose life you’ve shared for a brief yet precious moment. And if nothing good comes from it? Laugh.

Life is a journey of many paths, crossed by countless others. You may not all share the same destination, but in those brief, ripe moments, you share something indeed.