It was a Monday morning at the memory care.
I walked in expecting the usual rhythm and instead found the kitchen sealed off—
a plastic sheet wall, closed doors, rerouted hallways.
A pipe had burst over the weekend, sometime Saturday.
The kitchen flooded. Several surrounding rooms too.
An entire section of the building was cordoned off.
Which meant I couldn’t access the kitchen.
Which meant I was suddenly out of routine.
Which meant I was just… there.
I threw on a coat and found myself standing in a shared space with people who are usually separated by role and distance: kitchen staff, nurses, caregivers, housekeeping—and about forty residents.
On any normal day, these subgroups orbit each other with quiet friction.
Burnout becomes comparative. Exhaustion looks for witnesses.
There’s an unspoken competition over
who carries more,
who is stretched thinner,
who deserves more grace today.
But that morning, none of that showed up.
There was no flexing.
No posturing.
No standing over one another.
Everyone was simply close.
Close enough to feel that this was going to be a hard day.
Close enough to sense that the residents didn’t need to absorb the disruption.
Close enough to start moving—together.
People adjusted without being asked.
Tasks blurred.
Care flowed laterally instead of hierarchically.
At one point, the activities team put on music—old, familiar, classical.
The kind that doesn’t demand attention but gently fills the room.
And something shifted.
A few residents began to move to it—small motions at first.
A foot tapping.
A hand lifting.
One of the activity leaders started dancing, not for them, but with the music.
Then a resident joined her.
And suddenly they were moving together, not choreographed, not watched—just in flow.
It was quiet and beautiful and entirely unplanned.
No explanation.
No instruction.
No agenda.
Just bodies remembering how to respond to rhythm.
That was the moment it fully landed for me.
The system had failed just enough to dissolve the usual separations—not only between staff, but between function and feeling. Between care as task and care as presence.
What emerged in that shared space was what I’ve learned to recognize as proximity.
Not agreement.
Not efficiency.
Not heroism.
Just the quiet forgetting of difference in the presence of shared responsibility—and shared humanity.
I’ve learned that once you know how to see this, you can’t unsee it.
How often what we long for isn’t better systems, but fewer walls when systems break.
How grace doesn’t announce itself—it compresses space.
It draws people close enough to feel one another again.
That morning, nothing new was introduced.
No policy.
No plan.
No meeting.
Only nearness.
And in that nearness, people didn’t just keep things running—
they let life move.
They let rhythm return.
They let the residents receive not just care, but aliveness.
That’s what I want to remember.
Not the burst pipe.
Not the inconvenience.
But the way proximity returned the moment performance no longer had anywhere to stand—and how, for a brief while, the building breathed as one body again.