Bridges

No man is an island,
Entire of itself....
Any man's death diminishes me.
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore I never send to know for whom the bell tolls:
It tolls for thee
- John Donne

It is the bridges we build that connect us. and get us over obstacles...not just the literal ones whose intersecting lines of steel repeat and reinforce each other until a structure strong enough to drive on is constructed, but the individual human connections we make, which, when passed along and added together can't be easily broken. 

Our immediate bonds link us by complex, geometric structures to people we may never meet, but who are still essential to the strength of the whole. A simple gesture can have unknown consequences...ones that we may never know about but which become part of a chain.

We lived in Berkeley when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. A section of the San Francisco Bay Bridge fell down, an elevated freeway collapsed and all elevated structures were closed until they could be inspected. Until then, I never thought about how many of the roads I drove on routinely were bridges and how isolated I would be without them. 

I'm not saying that every move we make has enormous significance or that we never have a bad, surly, grumpy sort of day. But those things have consequences too, so as we are still building bridges, we shouldn't take anything we do for granted....