Let’s say encounters do endure. Where do they go? What happens to them? An excellent question. Are they like the data stored on my hard drives, much of it deletable, or like the plastic doomed to last forever in our oceans or landfills. Are they like my bookshelves groaning under the weight of every whim I had in front of a used book cart? Do they float like fairies, innumerable, immaterial, able to dance in multitudes on pinheads?
Doesn’t physics tell us that the endurance of encounters is a form of smuggling, a violation of fundamental zero-sum accounting principles.
Perhaps, however, the question is not what happens to encounters (as if patients) but rather where encounters are and what they do (agents). I’ll be quite explicit in my answer. Encounters occur when freshness from without is welcomed by livingness from within, in and through particular others. Think: windows, breezes, billows. Where do encounters reside? In the transcendent realm from which freshness arises and blows into the mundane. The manifestation of freshness in each encounter comprehends the particular freshness of every prior one ever. All encounters to date are implicit in the freshness that responds to the invitation of each livingness. It’s as if the breeze remembers all billowings.
What do encounters do? Can they possibly have consequence, especially if long past?
First of all, encounters are the channel by which freshness impacts the mundane world, and thence the material. Encounters present to us the ultimate point of what we do. They prioritize making common cause with others and othernesses through hospitality, friendship and exploration. They provide new discoveries, new visions, new creations, new relationships, and new arrivals through freshness which comprehends the freshness of all prior freshnesses. So every encounter is always just at the beginning of a cascade of consequent encounters on and on.
Second of all, freshness, this breeze of beyondness, is passionate for more and more encounters, more and more encountering, each encounter loved for itself, and ever more encounters to love. If there is ever a consummation of all encounters that have been and will be, it won’t be a final product, because freshness is never finished.
We are always residents of the mundane realm, and sometimes of the transcendent. In our encounters. Through encountering, the transcendent realm is where our imagination goes, and comes from.