Word: Connection

Sentence:

Connection begins when we look past what is different and stay long enough to discover what is shared.

Passage:

Connection often comes easiest when we can see ourselves in someone else. When the story feels familiar, the bridge is already there. I feel that with other principals all the time. There is an immediate sense of recognition, of knowing something about each other before much is even said. But some of the most important connections in my life did not begin with sameness. They began with difference.

What is harder is finding connection with people who seem, on the surface, completely different from us. But I have come to believe that difference is often where deeper connection is waiting. It just takes more work to find it.

It takes questions.
It takes listening.
It takes time.
It takes the willingness to stay curious long enough for someone’s story to unfold.

I remember sitting with a student who had spent years in a refugee camp waiting for asylum. His school had been bombed. There was no transcript to hand us, no neat record of where he had been or what he had endured.

I sat there knowing how different our lives had been. His family had waited years to come to America. I was a white, middle class man from Mississippi, and on the surface our lives could not have looked more different. As I sat there, I found myself wondering how connection begins when two lives seem so far apart.

Then I thought about my own story.

I remembered leaving Mississippi to move to Indiana as a preteen, crying in the back seat of my parents’ car as we drove away from everything I knew and everyone I loved.

My story was not his story. My pain was not his pain. I would never pretend they were the same.

But it gave me a place to start.

Through a translator, we began to talk about home. About the places we missed. About the memories that stayed with us. And somewhere in that conversation, connection began to take shape.

Connection is not always found in sameness. Sometimes it is found in the decision to look deeper. To listen longer. To believe that even across difference, there is still something human we can recognize in each other.

We all crave connection because it reminds us that we are not alone.

In education and many other careers, it is easy to stay in our silos. Easy to remain with people who think like us, lead like us, and live like us. But the connections that stretch us and humanize us usually ask more of us.

They ask us to slow down.
To ask better questions.
To listen with humility.
To stay long enough for empathy to have a chance.

That is where connection begins.

Your Turn:

Who in your life might you understand more deeply if you slowed down, asked a few more questions, and listened a little longer?

If The Match has meant something to you, pass it on to someone else.

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