I see life as an interwoven tapestry of relations, some threads bright and bold,
others fading at the seams.
Some hang loose, some intertwine like my child’s fingers, some come undone quietly, and some never quite take form.

I began weaving early.
Family tied for life, and surely from past lives.
Friends from school and parks, scraped knees and elastic marks,
childhood dosts who knew each other before we knew ourselves.
We grew upside by side, shared secrets under the stars, made promises we thought would never unravel.

Then came the college companions, midnight talks, tea on the terrace,
dreams half-formed and stitched into each other.
People who wove themselves into my identity for a season or two,
leaving behind laughter, heartache, and a familiar scent.

Some of them I lost in the name change after marriage.
Today, they’re just a sweet-chilly memory……

Work brought new threads, colleagues turned friends, alliances built over time.
We shared deadlines, boardrooms, red-eye flights, binged on pacifying chats during long projects, navigated dissent, celebrated wins.
Some bonds stretched across years.
Others? Snapped overnight…….

In community, in cities, in movements, I found unexpected weaves.
A neighbor became family.
A stranger, a lifeline.
Sometimes, the warmest threads are the ones we never meant to weave.

And then, beginning to build our old age home, or a quiet piece of heaven, so we see the full cloth.
Who stayed.
Who drifted.
Who I mended ties with.
And who I quietly folded away.

Because as I evolve, so do my needs.
And the meaning of relationships changes.
What once felt urgent becomes a soft memory.
What was fragile might be fortified with time.
And always, always, a few close threads remain.
Anchors. Heartstrings.

But it is not just people I have woven into my life.
I have helped stitch the networks of companies too from
Mergers, partnerships, handshakes across oceans to matrix of peers and industry.
Tapestries of ambition, woven with capital, strategy,
stories told in press releases, and policies redefined to shape industries.

I have seen governments narrate another kind of weave.
Alliances inked on paper. Old wounds wrapped in new diplomacy.
Bilateral ties bound by history, war, trade or simply, the hope of trust.
They speak of unity, but sometimes, the patchwork shows.
Stitched too quickly, just to cover the rips.

And then there’s the paradox of a hyperconnected world….
where we ‘like’ ‘follow’ ‘add’ and ‘tag’ yet the fabric feels thinner, somehow.
Many threads. Less depth. It looks whole from afar.
But up close… are we really woven in?

As I reflect on these ties,
I find myself withdrawing from the noise of the social world.
I choose a quiet coffee, and the ease of an honest mind.
I am wider to see fake and real. Close and far. Drama and stage of life.

Still, this is the beauty of relations.
We are weavers and the woven.
Every encounter, a knot.
Every departure, a thread let go.
What matters is not the perfection of the pattern,
but that we keep weaving with care, with intention, with heart.
In our soul.