I was on the drive north to our family cabin, sitting in the backseat with my dog as my father and older brother talked logistics of assembling wood duck boxes up in the front, and I kept thinking I didn’t really know them. Who are these people and why have I entrusted my life—or at least this afternoon by the Kettle River—to them? I resisted the urge to yell something out.

I’ve found myself asking this a lot recently, examining my family and who they are as people, sometimes scaring myself with such existentialist insecurities at any hour of the day. This is especially the case when I find myself returning to my “childhood-home” less and less and unintentionally referring to the Greens House here in St. Peter as “back home.” Do I really know my family the same way as I know other people, or even as I know myself?

As a child I did not question how I knew my family; I had no need to. I saw them every day, they fed me, clothed me. My dad took me fishing. My mom brushed my hair. My brothers teased me. Our familial relationship was reestablished day after day for the first 18 years of my life. I defined myself through them and saw myself as a part of the Kranz unit, like the way a suffix hangs on to a word or the way the peel of a cucumber is still very much a cucumber. I knew that word I hung on to and I knew there was a cucumber.

Or maybe “knew” isn’t the best word to describe what this was. I feel in the ignorant bliss of my childhood I trusted in these things to be there, recognized them only through an assumption of how things simply worked between people.

I did not need to know my parents as people, nor did I have the intellectual capacity to do so.  My parents were “Mom” and “Dad,” not their first names.

In a way it is true that our friends become our families in college. Instead of seeing my parents every morning at breakfast, it’s my friends every afternoon for lunch. Instead of yelping to my brother in the next bedroom over to kill a wasp for me, it’s scurrying around with the ladies in the Greens House looking for a glass jar to entrap the buzzing beast. I’ve come to know these people too—my friends—in a different way than I have come to know my family, but my continual relationship with them is easier to maintain simply due to the frequency of our time together.  I am able to share more time with my friends, to say their names, to actually see them, so it is no surprise that I often feel closer to them than my family.

But if knowing people is all a matter of proximity, I wonder what happens when we graduate from Gustavus. Or each time we move to a new “home.”

Do we completely lose our sense of knowing someone if and when we get far enough away, just like I often feel with my family?

And what, then, do we do once we admit to ourselves the rarity of ever being able to remain in one place long enough to fully know someone else? We can’t devote our lives to one place just because that is the only way we can know someone, but we also can’t degrade the value of a relationship just because it will never be complete—I can’t say there is no point in ever attempting to get to know someone just because I will never know them completely.

How do I live knowing that I can never fully know someone else, while still acknowledging that for me to function in this world I need to, in some way, know other people?

I guess my response to my own question would be to live independently (as in trusting oneself, not necessarily living alone) and intentionally (as in purposeful and thoughtful action). Ralph Waldo Emerson got it right in “Self Reliance” when he writes, “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” As I question my relationships with others, I always return to the idea that I only truly know myself, and the real value from knowing others is the way in which they lead me to develop my personal values and principles. Other than that, people really do come and go, so in many instances we have to go along with those assumed relationships, like I had with my parents.

If you see yourself as that suffix to a word, you better make sure you like what that first word means; and if you see yourself as that cucumber peel, you also have to recognize that while that peel is part of a whole, it is still quite different from the whole. So whatever your relationships with your family and friends are now, remember that you still stand there even if they leave, that you ultimately stand alone.

What are you going to do about yourself?