10. Just because people aren’t in our lives anymore, doesn’t mean they stop thinking about us and vice versa.

— Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

This is from Jeremy’s first entry in his community service reflection notebook. We could all learn from Jeremy’s drive to learn more about the back-stories of the people he meets in the course of his community service assignment. He, along with his best friend, are to return items pawned long ago by young people who felt they were at a crisis point in their lives — much like Jeremy feels he is in at the start of this story.

There are many poignant lines I could write about from this book, but yesterday this one seemed highlighted on the page for my eyes and heart. The sequence intrigues me. There are people who were part of our lives in our past whose impact is embossed within us. It doesn’t matter if the relationship was deep or surface, long-lasting or brief. If we continue to think of them, why do we often assume they never think of us too? Here, the emphasis is on others continuing to think about us before the vice versa.

I love the stories of the people I most cherish because I know the characters, the real people, from their life are woven together with all of the other characteristics I treasure. Granted, the stories that shape who we are now are not always pretty — this is real life — but the hardest times in life can enrich us like nothing else if we do not allow them to make us bitter or sour. Now I wonder even more how my presence in the lives of people from my past impacts who they are now and the stories they share.

As usual, my thoughts have wandered…..