Last week, my housemates and I sat in around our living room, writing on different colored strips of paper. Periodically, we would glance at a key in the center of our circle detailing what we should write:

On the yellow: Where we’ve seen joy this year.

On the blue: Where we’ve seen God.

On the purple: What we’ve learned this year that we’ll take into next year.

On the white: What we will do to continue on in service.

After writing, we linked the papers together, sharing our written thoughts as we folded and taped, folded and taped. After all 24 links were in the chain, one of my housemates said, “Now we’re all chained together.”

 Lately, I’ve been wondering what our relationships will be like in the years coming. Except for two of my housemates, we will all be in different states instead of rooms only a few steps or flight of stairs away. And except for a wedding in a few months, we don’t have planned meetings in the future. While I have questions, I don’t have any doubts that we will be connected together for a long time. For me, the proof is in what is written in that chain.

I wrote, among other things, that I saw joy and God in each Sycamorean and every one around me. Everyone else’s answers varied, but one thing that they had in common were people because people often have the greatest impact. Some of us wrote that we had gained newfound knowledge of ourselves. Some of us wrote specific acts of service that we will continue to do and some others were more vague. I, for one, will try to be more involved with social justice in whatever community I am. Our answers were all different, but they all had something in common: They were all influenced by each other, further proving that…

“There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them”(Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling).

Or rather, there are some things you can’t share without being chained together forever, and being in the Sycamore House together for a year is one of them.