I know I have already put up and posted some fall decorations (that’s about the extent of it for this season!), but I never posted about the highlight of my trip up north this summer. Maybe”highlight” isn’t really the right expression. It might make it sound like it was the best thing… that everything else was secondary to it. And that is not the case. I loved everything about being in Denmark! Lazy reading days on the scarcely populated beaches and the rainy days of antique shopping with my daughter; the cool cafés and scrumptious pastries; the delightful shops and the well-mannered, friendly, hospitable people; the trade-mark Scandinavian home designs- exterior & interior; the wide open spaces and the intriguing, tucked-away-in-the-woods places & spaces. So it wasn’t a “highlight” in a comparative sense.

Rather it was the cherry on top, flower in the lapel, sort of thing. It topped off an already successful vacation with just the right amount of unexpected, “just-because” kind of delight that makes everything else feel even better, feel “right” somehow. And it really did happen at the very, very end of our stay.

We had left the rental tidy, the car was loaded and all we had to do was to bring back the return bottles, fill up the tank and we would be on our way to Hamburg. We drove down the road from our rental and made a right onto the road we had taken most days to get to the larger beach ten minutes away, past the gas station to the small grocery store we had shopped at almost daily for our meals. We passed by a bearded man walking with a young, pretty, blond girl with black-rimmed glasses, whom my daughter pointed out, “Mom, look how adorable she is!” By the time I had registered what I had seen, we were already pulling into the parking-lot. “Oh wow, they look just like the family from one of my top favorite instagram accounts!” My daughter and I quickly got onto Insta to check and confirm it must be them. So I let her and Jan out of the car, too embarrassed to join me, and I drove back. Not seeing them, I made a u-turn to head back to the store. By then, they had come out of the Gas-station store and were now walking in the direction of the grocery store.

Writing this all down, it does give off some stalking vibes! Maybe even more than a little. Hmmm?. But I had to! To be honest, it felt like catching sight of an old friend or work colleague you hadn’t expected to see at an event. You have so many shared interests and history, that you just have to make a fool of yourself and call out to them across the large room of strangers, elbow your way through the crowd and say, “hi!” That’s all this was! Right? I mean, I’d known Anthony and Caroline for a couple of years, shared their aesthetic taste, was inspired by how they included their young children in their creative endeavors (something I had never been good at doing), and appreciated the beautiful things they were creating. The only thing that made it a little bit creepy is that they didn’t know me!

That had to change! I had to stop and tell them I was a big fan of the Instagram account documenting them as they restored and converted a small town doctor’s clinic into their beautiful home @-our-new-home-. I had to express my gratitude to them for sharing their creative content. I felt compelled to mirror back to them not only what a beautiful family they had, but what a beautiful family-life they seem to share. So that is what I did. I interrupted their little walk, introduced myself, and laid it on‘em!

I really hope they didn’t feel creeped out or disturbed. The exchange couldn’t have lasted much more than a minute or maybe two, during which Anthony graciously and humbly accepted my outpouring of praise. Once we were back on the road, Charis and I basked in the afterglow of what had just happened at least as far as to the ferry: “I can’t believe it was them!! What are the chances!?!” It had been the perfect bow to wrap up what had been, on the whole, a lovely ten days.

That was a little more than a month ago. And still, since then, I keep coming back to this encounter with some nagging questions. I can’t help but ask myself why I felt all those things. Why did I feel the compulsion to introduce myself? Why the need to express gratitude? Why did running into Anthony and his daughter feel meaningful and special somehow?

So after thinking a lot about it, I have come up with an answer:

Electricity.

“Throw the Ball of Yarn!” Is an uncreative name for an activity I’ve often done with groups, either for first introductions or to illustrate a basic principle of relationship dynamics. Everyone stands in a circle, and I have a big ball of cheap yarn which I throw to someone while still holding the end of the thread. Depending on the objectives, they are to either introduce themselves according to the given criteria, or respond in some way to what the yarn-thrower has asked or stated.

This palpable act of throwing the ball of yarn to someone represents what John Gottman Ph.d calls Bids for Connection. Anytime we share something personal with another or others, whether it be a need, a longing, a disappointment, something we’ve created, a boundary, or a joy, we are making a bid for connection. Even if my husband enthusiastically points to a new bird at our feeder, he is making a bid for connection. He is wanting to share his momentary awe and joy with me. Or in keeping with the illustration, he is throwing out a ball of yarn, a fishing line if you will, as an invitation to form a node of connection.

But throwing the yarn is only the invitation. It is, in and of itself, not a connection. To be a connection, the other must catch the yarn. And if that sounds obvious, it is even more so when one is actually standing in a circle throwing yarn at each other! But, evidently, it is not nearly so clear in the real-life of our actual relationships. So I often also describe this game in conversations with people to describe what appears to me to be a central cause for relational dissatisfaction and dysfunction, not just in the most intimate relationship of marriage, which the Gottmans explore in detail in their marriage books, but also in our wider social circles, both on and off line, which, in turn, inevitably weakens the broader fabric of society.

What does not catching the yarn look like in real life interactions? How does one catch the yarn? The answers to both of those questions in the microscopic will be as many and varied as grains of sand. We can deflect, defend, dismiss, disengage, devour, delude, deny, disavow… and we could go through the entire alphabet that way. But zoomed out, they will share common attributes. In the yarn-circle, illustrating the different attitudes we can take to the ball of yarn being passed to us becomes visceral. When the polyester clump just falls to someone’s feet with zero acknowledgement and no effort made to catch it at all, something that is all too common in our daily interactions suddenly becomes undeniably visible and palpable to everyone in the circle. We can also slyly shove it out of sight, as if it never happened, so we won’t be called on to make some kind of reply. We can just reflexively, maybe even aggressively bat it away. Or simply give lip service to it as we politely pass it on or stash it in our basement. The real life circumstances of not catching will vary in every shade of every color, but it will be in one of these three categories: some form of an aggressive refusal, a passive avoidance, or an inauthentic concession. Fight, flight/freeze, and fawning. Odd what a simple ball of yarn can make us feel when it is kicked aside after we have thrown it – our bid for connection.

What does catching look like? Again, in the details, like every color in the spectrum. From a higher altitude maybe something along the lines of “Please,” “Thank You,” and “I’m Sorry.” It doesn’t follow that Catching must mean we say yes to what is offered or asked of us. For starters, not every demand, enquiry, or request made of us is a bid for connection. Sometimes, maybe even a lot of times, it is simply some form of exploitation; to extrapolate some good or service from us without any meaningful connection at all. But even the genuine bids for connection that come our way can exceed our own unique capacity to accommodate them, and there are ways to catch these even if we can’t or don’t want to keep them.

Again, this can be easily demonstrated in the yarn-throwing-circle. There is a huge difference between letting the yarn fall to the ground in front of you unnoticed, and catching it softly, like in an egg toss, by expressing acknowledgement and gratitude for the precious gift of vulnerability – since the genuine bid for connection is always an act of vulnerability – and tossing it back, or onward, just as carefully. “Thank you for sharing with me, including me, thinking of me…I’m sorry I’m unable to meet your expectation for these reasons… Please try again or this instead…” One small stitch of human connection made!

I bet you didn’t think you were coming here to be lectured on group warm-ups and knitting social connection. You came to see what I meant by “Electricity” and what it has to do with the way I felt in Denmark meeting an Instagram hero of mine.

But it shouldn’t take much nudging from me to see what happens when we replace the yarn with a coper wire and add a battery. We get an electrical current. I believe there is a kind of “power-current” that circulates when real, human connections are made, when relationships are reciprocal, when attention, intention, and commitments are exchanged, when we choose to see each other, when we acknowledge the invitations for connection and handle them with care, and when, against all odds, we find some shared space, some point of value around which to meet, even if it is only two or three of us.

This is the current I felt on our last day in Denmark… in fact, I felt it the entire time I was there, but it peaked at that last encounter. Social Media can often feel like millions of balls of yarn being thrown around indiscriminately, and with the “Like” button hardly feeling like a sufficient catcher’s mitt, they are rarely soldered into meaningful connective conduits. I’m sure I don’t have to explain in any detail how attention begins to flow only one way in almost every media sector, even in this supposedly flattened one, and, beyond that, there is little to no shared Intentions or Commitments between the participants of this digital market place. In other words, one may become either an invisible, anonymous consumer or an increasingly more visible content-provider feeding hundreds, thousands, or millions of anonymous consumers. Either way, few real nodes of connection are being made, and where there is no connection, there is no juice flowing.

I am definitely on the consumer end of this transaction, having traded in buying decoration magazines for Pinterest and Instagram, so I can attest to this. The hours spent on these apps are certainly feeding something, they are just not feeding my most primal need for human connection. So when I happened to drive past a person who is at the top of an almost 70,000-follower-media-pyramid I belong to, from whom I have “caught” untold numbers of “yarn-balls,” you better believe I am going to grab the opportunity to try and make a genuinely meaningful stitch by tossing one back in a face-to-face encounter! For that brief moment, I was not anonymous. For that minute and a half, I was not invisible. In the space and time that it takes to make an introduction and say thank you, our wires crossed and, at least for me, released the flow of energy.

Serendipity

Serendipity, one of my two favorite words, is usually defined along the lines of “finding something good without looking for it.” A happy accident, as it were. But none of the definitions I found encapsulate the special flavor the word, or rather more to the point, the occasions for which we harness this particular word, has for me. It is not just any “good thing.” It is not just an accident. It is also not entirely accurate that one is not looking for it, since once it has happened, we realize that it is exactly what we were looking for, we just didn’t know it. I only ever use the word Serendipity to describe the unexpected convergence of the right good thing happening at the right time to make a needed or helpful or invigorating connection. And often it turns out to be just the thing that helps us move forward or get unstuck. Finding a hundred Euros on the street on a random Tuesday is a “happy accident,” but it is not necessarily serendipity. However, winning €10,000 in the lottery the very day the courts tell you you won’t get the €10,000 back of which you had been defrauded (true story – actually happened to our landlady!) – this is serendipity.

When I think of all the things that have to align in such moments, I cannot help but feel as if there is an undercurrent of power which, in some mysterious way, arranges the convergence for us. As if the time and place has been in the calendar all along, and we simply had not been told beforehand. I would even go so far as to say this positive, electric, under-current is always happy to flow through us and, needing these nodes of connection to do so, is willing to take some liberties with our schedules!