I recently read a post on a travel blog I follow, it spurred some thoughts on connections made while traveling.
When you travel, you meet so many people also on the road. In these settings it’s easy to quickly bond and swap travel experiences. One evening is often all it takes to feel connected. Then you find each other on social media, Instagram, Facebook, whatsapp… so many ways to connect. And before you know it, you part ways promising to stay in touch.
However, this often doesn’t happen. You could blame spotty internet and being on the road, but is that really all?
Friendships, they take time. Imagine, each connection as a small thread from your heart to theirs. Every shared experience and moment adds another thread.
So it stands to reason, those friendships who have been with you for years, are reinforced, maintained by the many threads connecting you. New and these travel friends, the connection is delicate, perhaps only a single tiny thread, made to stretch over time and distance.
While you can build these over social media, those threads aren’t as strong as a shared experience or moment. It takes more effort and time to grow a friendship over distance, I imagine that the fragile threads you form are stretched to the maximum by distance, and the thinner they are the less likely they will fully hold. You may not pour new effort into them, but the ghost of the connection is the memory you’ve shared. It’s difficult to maintain and grow hundreds of threads all at once.
In the end, each thread is unique, it holds a purpose and a memory. While the person at the other end may no longer be there, they were there once, and that is what matters. For this reason, it is important to keep sending out threads, you never know where a new thread will lead.
Take a chance, form a connection, and start that common thread!