One life intersecting with another is a momentous occasion. In the context of the role of Caregiver and Recipient, the intersection appears to be about the Caregiver providing something for the Recipient. In reality, its a two-way street.

How many times has your life connected with anothers and then taken a different turn? Most often, this goes unnoticed because the influences are measured in minute subtleties. In truth, it happens all the time.

If youve ever spent any time on the ocean, odds are youve gotten the sense that there is nothing on this earth that is not affected by everything else. A gust of wind that happened over another continent years ago put a number of molecules of water in motion that went on to affect each molecule around them. The energy spread, influencing everything in its path until whatever is left of that initiating energy ends up lapping at your feet. In that journey, the connection is obvious. Energy moves molecule moves molecule, over time and place, until you're touched.

Why would it be less so with the human experience?

Conceptually, were not much more than elaborate molecules bumping into each other and in a constant state of changing trajectories as a result. We just happen to measure our directional changes as influences on our experience of life, and work under the assumption that we have the free-will to choose a significant part of our experience. Regardless, essentially, like with everything else, our main function has to do with responding to stimuli.

Sometimes, the influence of a particular intersection with another human being spins one or the other or both into a new direction thats quite obvious. Any tragic accident is a clear reflection of this. Those notable occasions hint at how that is the way things are there is nothing that happens to us that does not shift our direction and the direction of those around us. Accidents are the same concept, only writ large.

No matter where you are in space and time, your whole life has conspired to get you to that point. Taking it one step further, the complete history of the Earth and mankind comes together, in you, in each moment, and the future of everything steps off from there as well.

It is as if each moment is a vacuum which you are called upon to fill. Had anything been different, you can sense you would have ended up filling another space that called out for you. The same is no less true with the other person or people with whom your life intersects.

Balance, it appears, though always sought, is only really attained in fleeting moments. If you ask an airline pilot how often is the plane shes flying off-course, shes likely to reply 99 percent of the time. Every moment in life is a matter of course correction. This is true from the cell to the organism to the planet to the Universe itself.

Wherever there is a vacuum, something gets pulled in to fill the void and tweak the balance a tad one way or the other. In one sense, time itself is composed of innumerable voids awaiting fulfillment. People come together in moments of time and fill those voids. In the process they are collaborators in forming a new future with a slightly different balance.

To take yourself out of that equation and work under the assumption that it is only the others needs that calls you to them in the healing process is to deny that you are a part of the Great Mystery. In every moment, there is something there for you, as well.

The sum total of your life has led you to this place in time, where or whenever it might be. It has given you a background, skills, practice, understandings, and relationships to draw from. It has provided you an opportunity to use any number of them, at your choice. The sum total of the others life has led him or her to this place in time in the same way. Therefore, the sum total of both your lives has collectively put you together, and is now asking of each of you to do something with that moment; to both be affected by it AND affect the moments to come.

In essence, you are (like everything and everybody else is) an element of existence that not only seeks balance for itself, but is an AGENT of balance for everything else. In the Grand Scheme of things nothing that happens in any moment of time or place is about anything but the seeking of balance.

It is not about constantly having to know why yours and someone elses lives have been put together. Its enough to assume that wherever you are you were led there by a history so unique that it sought that moment to express itself as an agent of balance. The logical next step is to work on the assumption that the same is true with any one with whom you are in connection.

From that point on, all that remains is the exploration.