There is a Chinese proverb that reads: “It takes hundreds of rebirths to bring two persons to ride in the same boat; it takes a thousand eons to bring two persons to share the same pillow.”
Chinese cultures believe in predetermined relationships both between lovers and between friends, determined, by and large, by actions done in previous incarnations. The word they have for the force which pulls people together into these relationships, the mechanism by which we are placed in each others lives, is "yuanfen": (缘分) — we have no direct English translation. Yuanfen is precious and it is rare. And it is how, out of the nearly seven-and-a-half-billion people on Earth, two people might meet.
So on August 27th, 2012 @ 2:28pm — the beginning of my second year working as an instructor at Indiana State — I received this email:
“Hello Chris,
Thank you for volunteering to work with a first-year teaching assistant. I am hoping that you will consent to mentor Dana Sloneker this term. I would like for Dana to observe both 101 and 105 classes.
Dana will be contacting you directly to introduce herself and to set up her observation schedule. She needs to do roughly one observation per month. If you have any questions or concerns, or if you can no longer mentor this term, please let me know.”
It was the next day that I first saw you in the hallway of the English Department — I was talking with someone else, and you ducked your head and muttered an “excuse me” as you walked past.
I stopped by your office later that day — I don’t think it will surprise anyone here that you weren’t the one who contacted me directly to introduce yourself — and I was late to class that afternoon — and every afternoon after for about two weeks.
So in the three years I’ve known you, we’ve been through quite a bit; there have been moments of sadness and of laughter. We’ve moved three times — I’ll never forget standing on the stairs in Terre Haute with the desk jammed halfway up, on the phone with my mother who was calmly shopping at the hardware store while you sat next to me in tears — we’ve begun new careers, bought a house, and raised two cats, though how well those have turned out is debatable.
But I’ve learned in these three years that it’s not in the big things, the life-changing events, the nice dinners, the expensive (relatively speaking) gifts, where you find love. It’s in the car on the way to work or in the cereal aisle at the grocery store where love lives. It’s in folding the laundry, in sharing those terrible cherry donut balls that taste like children’s Tylenol. It’s in sitting and laughing as the cats chase each other into the room, slipping on the hardwood floor. Love isn’t having someone to do something with, it’s having someone to do nothing with.
Thanks for moving to Indiana three years ago. I love you.