A few weeks ago, I came across a story about a butterfly and a dandelion.
The butterfly had spent its short life drifting through gardens and orchards, while the dandelion stood quietly in a meadow, feeding the bees before becoming a delicate globe of seeds waiting for the wind. According to the story, they were old friends. When the wind finally came, the butterfly took one last flight as the dandelion released its seeds, and together they drifted into the sky.
Whether the story is ancient folklore or simply beautiful fiction doesn’t really matter.
It stayed with me.
Perhaps because, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more aware of how many people pass through our lives. Some stay for decades. Others for only a season. A shared experience, a conversation, or a few days spent traveling together can leave an impression that lingers long after the moment itself has passed.
Travel has a way of making those encounters feel even more profound.
When we travel, we’re often surrounded by people we didn’t know a week earlier. We share meals, stories, laughter, long walks, and sometimes conversations that become surprisingly meaningful. Then the journey ends, everyone returns home, and life moves forward. We promise to stay in touch. Sometimes we do. Often we don’t.
That doesn’t diminish what was shared.
Recently, I learned that someone I walked the Camino with in 2025 passed away unexpectedly at the age of sixty-six.
We weren’t close friends, nor did we walk together every day. Like so many people you meet while traveling, our paths crossed for a little while.
We shared part of the trail, sang together, celebrated with a cold beer, and wished each other Buen Camino. Those ordinary moments now feel far more significant than I realized at the time.
When I heard the news, I found myself scrolling back through old photographs. There he was, walking the trail ahead of me. There we were, smiling in front of the Cathedral in Santiago after reaching our destination. At the time, it was simply another photograph from another beautiful day. I couldn’t have known it would one day become a reminder of how briefly our lives sometimes overlap.
His passing reminded me that people arrive unexpectedly, plans change, and journeys take turns we never see coming. Sometimes we don’t recognize the significance of an ordinary moment until much later.
I don’t know if that’s what the butterfly story was meant to be about. It’s simply what I carried away from it.
It reminded me that not every meaningful relationship is measured by years.
Some are measured in miles.
Some people walk beside us for a lifetime. Others accompany us for only a small stretch of the path before life carries each of us in a different direction. We may never fully understand why our paths crossed in the first place, only that they did, and that we’re somehow different because of it.
More and more, I’m finding myself trying to swim with the current instead of against it. I’m learning to hold my plans a little more loosely and to pay closer attention to the people beside me today instead of assuming there will always be more time tomorrow.
Because, in the end, perhaps our lives are shaped not only by the people who stay, but also by those with whom we were fortunate enough to share a few miles.
