Who is your favorite person, and why?  Join me in an exercise to break this question down to its tiniest parts.  Just as something physical, such as our bodies, can be broken down into smaller pieces, so can everything else we encounter.  Our physical selves can be broken down into skin, bones, muscles, ligaments, and grotesque liquids.  These biological items and byproducts can also be broken down into various types of cells.  The cells can also break down – nuclei, mitochondria, and stuff I can barely remember.  Then, cell fragments can be fragmented into atoms.  And the atoms can be split into subatomic particles.

Wow. 

In our monetary system, dollars are split into cents; if you are into penny stocks, cents are separated, too.  A century is broken down into decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds…and so on.  So physical things and conceptual things, too, can all be broken down.  This brings me to the question of the evening…what is the smallest part of a relationship? 

Queue the Jeopardy song. 

I’ve asked this question in workshops far and wide.  I’ve asked teachers, parents, and even dads who were preparing to return home to their children from incarceration.  Everyone has excellent answers to this.  Relationships can be broken down into other immeasurable, only conceivable elements.   These include trust, love, empathy, care, happiness, shared goals, compatibility, communication, respect, and honesty.  Every one of these things is important.  In my opinion, none constitute the subatomic part of a relationship.  Controllable or uncontrollable, the teensiest, tiniest, itsy, bitsy part is the…. drum roll……interaction. 

Our existence, or coexistence, is divided into infinite interactions with people and the world.  Some interactions take only a second – the smile, the wink, the nostril flair, the frown, or the roll of the eyes.  Others are longer and more pronounced – the compliment, the high five, the still face, hug, or kiss, the insult, the mischaracterization, the lie, the slap.  Sometimes, our thoughts become microscopic actions that create or destroy our futures with those around us.  And it’s too bad that we cannot always control them.  If we could, the world would be a very different place.

This is why when two people love each other, I mean really love each other – the two-way street of the idea of love, it just works out.  It is all about the thoughts. If you think she’s beautiful, you can tell her. Sometimes, she knows by the way you look at her, too. You can tell a child she’s smart, or give her the fist bump when she gets the answer right. She knows what you think, right there and then.

This concept holds in our schools and is found in how the best teachers interact with their students.  Great teachers aren’t just performers.  They are people who knew early on in their lives their affinities for helping kids of all ages get a chance to become their best selves.  All the MCAS, New York State Regents, and NCLB tests in our country cannot measure how much our teachers care about our students.  Those tests that judge the excellent teachers from the bad in the newspapers can’t tell you why someone chooses to teach kids to read in Harlem, Compton, Dorchester, Appalachia, or Chicago.  Why do they go to work every day in a place where they can be assaulted by a dysregulated child or insulted by a dysregulated adult?  Why?  Because they care. 

Folks, great people like this are getting harder and harder to find in the post-COVID era.  Let’s respect them in our words and actions, big and small.  Please give them the subatomic feeling that they matter by smiling and saying thanks.  Very easy things to do.