There are people who pass through our lives and leave an impression we may not fully understand until years later.
Sometimes we don't even realize what we have given someone. A conversation. A moment of encouragement. A way of seeing the world. A reminder that they are not alone. We move through our days never knowing which small interactions might stay with another person long after we have forgotten them.
On Friday, I was struggling.
I had been working hard for the last ten months, both with the work I am creating and with my own personal growth. It felt like life had been placing one roadblock after another in my path, and I was tired of fighting my way through them. I could feel my mind wanting to fall back into old patterns of fear and victimhood.
I reached out to a dear friend back in Florida, and she offered me words of wisdom and support. I was grateful, but the heaviness was still there.
The next day, someone arrived in my life who I didn't realize I needed.
A couple of months ago, a friend I knew from Kansas City reached out after seeing that I was in Panama. We had met through our sangha, a meditation group, and she mentioned that she would be in Panama in September and hoped we could meet.
I told her I didn't have a car and was staying in a small beach town a couple of hours away. She said she would come to me.
Over the following weeks, plans changed and shifted, as they often do when traveling. Eventually, we decided to play it by ear, but she told me she still hoped to make the trip.
On Saturday, there were several hurdles. She woke up late, putting her behind schedule, and a drive that should have taken about an hour stretched much longer because of unexpected construction and weekend traffic. When she finally arrived, she was apologetic and frustrated by everything that had gotten in the way.
But when we embraced, something shifted.
I could see my own frustration reflected back at me. All those roadblocks I had been fighting suddenly looked a little different. We both laughed, took a breath, and agreed to let go of what the visit was supposed to look like and simply allow it to be what it was.
She told me that despite all of the frustration, she had felt a strong urge over and over again that she needed to see me.
I felt deeply loved and seen in that moment.
And I hadn't realized how much I needed someone to embrace me that way.
As we caught up, I asked how long it had been since we had actually seen each other. After doing the math, we realized it had been fourteen years.
Fourteen years.
She had moved away from Kansas City about six years before I moved to Florida, and yet sitting together again felt strangely familiar. It was as though I had seen her the week before.
Some people leave that kind of impression on you.
Because we had met through the sangha, we shared a philosophical and spiritual background that made it easy to slip back into a deeper kind of conversation. We talked about our mutual teacher, Ben Worth, and remembered him fondly.
Ben was a complex person, and not everyone had the same experience of him. But for both of us, he was an important part of our lives. We experienced him as someone who arrived at a particular point in our lives and helped us look deeply into ourselves. The shadow work we did during that time set us on a trajectory of transformation and healing that continues to shape who we are.
I told her that Ben had passed away a couple of years ago.
And yet, as we talked about him, it was clear that something of him is still alive in both of us. Not necessarily in the person he was, but in the work he helped us do, the lessons we carried forward, and the light we continue to share with others.
We caught each other up on mutual friends we had lost touch with and on the lives we had built since those years in Kansas City. She told me that she had been following me and my work online for years and that she was a big fan of what I was creating.
That meant more to me than she probably realized.
She also shared that she was in Panama navigating some difficult family circumstances of her own. Once again, the roles shifted. We were each able to offer the other encouragement, strength, and a reminder that we didn't have to carry everything alone.
Eventually, we made our way to the beach.
The Pacific was covered in reddish algae that the locals were calling “red tide.” At first, it reminded me of sargassum, but I soon learned this was something different from the red tide I know from Florida. This was a type of red algae that had been accumulating along parts of Panama’s Pacific coast and, according to the locals, wasn't harmful to swim in. It could, however, cling to you when you got in the water.
We walked farther down the beach until we found a clearer place and got into the water.
We swam, laughed, talked about hardships and joys, and simply enjoyed being together.
At one point she turned to me, smiling and laughing, and said something that captured the strangeness of the whole experience.
After all these years, we hadn't managed to meet again somewhere in the United States, in either of our home states.
We had found each other in Panama.
It felt almost kinset, as though somehow all of the circumstances had aligned to bring us into that particular moment.
I had the opportunity to share my watercolor paintings with her in person. When she looked at the paintings I had recently created in Panama, she told me she could recognize the people as Panamanian.
Because she is Panamanian herself, hearing that meant a great deal to me.
She has beautiful hazel eyes, and as she looked at the paintings, she could see parts of herself reflected back.
That is something I have wanted to give to the people I have been painting here and in Mexico. I want to create space for people who are not always represented to feel seen. To say, in my own way, I see you. I see the beauty, the humanity, the stories, and the presence that are here.
Perhaps that is part of what art can do.
And perhaps that is part of what we can do for one another, too.
As she prepared to leave, she offered to connect me with people in Panama if I ever needed support. We embraced for a long time, the kind of embrace that feels more like sisters than old friends, and promised to find our way back to each other again someday.
After she left, I thought about how little we know about the impressions we leave behind.
We may think a conversation was ordinary when it was meaningful to someone else. We may think a friendship has faded because years have passed, when in another person's life the connection has remained quietly present. We may never know that something we said, created, or simply offered by being ourselves helped another person through a difficult time.
And sometimes, without realizing it, we become the person someone needs on the very day they need us.
I am grateful for the people who have left their impressions on my life.
And I am especially grateful for Ben Worth, whose presence in our lives continues to ripple outward in ways he may never have fully known. Thank you, Ben, for the work you did, for the difficult doors you helped us open, and for the gift of helping us see more deeply into ourselves. The lives you touched continue to carry that work forward.
Perhaps that is the beautiful mystery of being human.
We touch one another, we carry pieces of one another forward, and long after our paths separate, something remains.
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If you enjoyed What Remains, you might also enjoy Curiosity, Learning, and a Trip to Mama, a reflection on what living in another country can teach us when we stay curious, listen deeply, and allow unfamiliar experiences to broaden the way we see the world.
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