by Eric Hodgdon
A couple of weeks ago, I was flying to Santa Barbara, CA for some intense training. Coming from Boston at that time, this was a welcome change in weather. Boston is awesome in the spring but we’d been having a lot of rain and the temperature had been hovering in the 50’s for a while. I was very much looking forward to the southern California sun to say the least. The two people that I was rooming with, and met only a few months prior at another event, had split the costs on an AirBnB house and had been in Santa Barbara for a few days already.
I arrived late that Wednesday night and the second that I walked in the door, I felt like I was visiting their home, even though they are both married to other people. They offered me a glass of wine, some hors d’oeuvres and asked me to sit and join their conversation. Within 1 hour, one of us cried, one of us looked for advice and all 3 of us laughed out loud. By 1 am we needed to go to bed to be ready for our training the next day. We could have stayed up talking all night.
When I put my head on the pillow that night, tired from the long flight from Boston, I couldn’t help but reflect on the our conversation. In a very short period of time, it deepened relationships in so many ways. I had shared my story of losing my daughter, Zoi, with both Marcella and Spike – and Marcella cried. Spike asked for some advice on how to move through a difficult situation – Marcella and I shared stories of how we worked through a similar situation. And Spike told us a joke that sent all three of us into a laughing fit with tears coming out of our eyes.
It’s in these moments where we find connection and relationships forming in our lives. And the best part, most of the time, they are unscripted moments. You never know who you’re going to meet, who you will get to know better, and who will inspire you to be better tomorrow than you are today. I know I’m better for knowing them.
