But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.
And there's a hand my trusty friend
And give me a hand o' thine
And we'll take a right goodwill draught
for auld lang syne
Robert Burns
But Seas Between Us Broad Have Roared
I have a large plastic folder at home that I cannot throw away.
I have been careful about almost everything else. Since my cancer diagnosis, I have done what the Swedes call death cleaning: giving things away, discarding what no longer earns its place, loosening my grip on objects that once felt essential—like photos, which I have passed on to posterity. Books have gone. Papers. Mementoes I defended for years with elaborate justifications now seem strangely willing to leave.
But not this.
The folder is plain and slightly warped with age. Inside it are business cards and contact cards collected over decades, mostly from Christian conventions and gatherings in Berlin, Paris, Edinburgh, and other cities whose names still feel larger than my present world. The cards are from the French, Germans, Dutch, Belgians, Japanese, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Italians, Swedes, and other nationalities. Names, email addresses, family photos, and phone numbers—sometimes with handwritten notes; details that felt important at the time.
There is no practical reason to keep them. Decades have passed. I will not contact these friends. Life, with its quiet and uncompromising turns, has made that impossible. Some of them will be dead. Some unreachable. Some so changed that even recognition would feel dishonest. I am no longer who I was when these cards were exchanged across café tables strewn with leaflets, faith, and optimism.
And yet the folder remains.
What it holds is not a network, nor even nostalgia in the usual sense. It is evidence. Proof that for a moment—sometimes only a very brief one—connection happened. That faith made strangers speak to one another as if they belonged to the same story, even if they would never share another chapter.
I’ve been thinking about this folder in connection with Auld Lang Syne, written down by Robert Burns, who once lived just along the road from me here on Scotland’s west coast. With music added, the song is often treated as sentimental—a harmless ritual for New Year’s Eve or other partings. But I don’t think it is really about the past at all.
Auld Lang Syne mourns the limits of time.
It recognizes something quietly unbearable: that some connections are real, even sacred, and yet cannot be sustained within one human lifespan, one geography, one changing self. The song never says we will stay. It only says we once held this together. And that restraint is everything.
There is a kind of honesty in that which feels almost moral. The song does not pretend that love, friendship, or shared struggle can always survive careers, illness, distance, age, or death. It accepts that finitude fractures continuity—not because people fail, but because life itself is short and fragile.
Psychologically, this is rare. Most cultures offer us stories that resolve connection into permanence: always, forever, till death do us part. Auld Lang Syne offers something more difficult, and perhaps more truthful: connection can be complete without being continuous.
Sociologically, that idea unsettles us—especially now, when technology whispers that nothing should ever be lost, that every relationship can be retrieved if only we try hard enough. The song gently frees us from that demand. It says: you did not betray the bond simply because time moved faster than you could.
That is why it is sung at thresholds. It is not so much a farewell as a witness. Someone stands with you—only briefly—to acknowledge that what existed was real, that it mattered, and that it has not been erased by silence or absence.
The handclasp at the end matters. People cross arms awkwardly, unsure who is holding whom. It is a physical admission of the truth the song dares to hold: connection can be briefly re-entered, but not permanently re-inhabited. We touch, and then we let go.
There is something almost theological in this, even though the song never names it. A sense that meaning exceeds duration. That what is shared participates in something larger than time, even if time itself cannot hold it.
This is why I cannot throw the folder away.
Those cards are not unfinished business. They are not failures of friendship. They are witnesses. Each one says: for a moment, this mattered. That prayer was shared. That recognition crossed borders that history works very hard to keep intact.
This life is not long enough to carry all the love it generates. Some of it must be set down without resolution.
And yet.
There is a moment in the Gospels where Jesus turns to a dying man beside him and says, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” It is not explained. No map is drawn. No mechanics are offered. It is simply a promise spoken at the edge of time, where explanation would be too small.
But in these words of Jesus, we do not have a promise so much as a denouement: a new life where old connections, found worthy of that life, may renew—and where friendships, old and new, may meet again at the cusp of eternity.
So I keep the cards.
And I keep the question.
And still, the cup is raised.
'And Jesus said to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”'
Luke 23:43
Image by Copilot
