Every time you look someone in the eyes, whether it’s a stranger on the subway, the love of your life, or a baby passing by in a stroller … it’s a great feeling. And you may never look at that person again, but you’ll always have that moment; that metaphysical connection; that thread between you two. And by the time you die, hopefully you’ll have a spiderweb full of connections. That’s what life is all about: our connectedness, and the shared experience of the human condition.
I’ve been incredibly blessed to have traveled the world, making dozens of friends, experiencing so many wonderful things and ultimately evolving as a person as a result. I remember meeting the little girl photographed above in Nicaragua while hiking on Isla Ometepe. She and her sister were playing in the yard of their modest home when they spotted me walking down the road and ran over. I may have not spoken fluent Spanish, and English certainly wasn’t their first language … but we connected for a moment over photography. With the permission of their mother, who was sitting on the porch, I photographed the girls in their yard for a few minutes before showing them the pictures on the LCD screen of my Nikon. They were giddy about the whole thing, laughing at each other with an innocence that was so refreshing in the often dark and morbid “real world” that we live in.
Once we finished, I gave their mom a couple of dollars to buy the kids something later in the day … then before I could walk away, this little girl who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, stuck her hand out to give me a farewell handshake. What a little diplomat in the making I thought to myself … and what a unique moment of connectedness … just a wonderful feeling.
I’ll most likely never see this girl again, but the 10-minutes I shared with her and her family on Isla Ometepe is something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life. And that’s why I love traveling: because I’m able to add more and more threads to that spiderweb I mentioned at the beginning of this entry.
