I spent this evening with two of my dearest friends, Justin and Ashley. Justin and I met each other when I was in college and he was in high school and we were both involved with a local debate team. In 2009, Justin and I moved in together, and Ashley moved in with us sometime after that because she and Justin were dating. (They’re married now, which is part of the reason I moved out. For some reason, staying seemed awkward.) Anyway, Justin and Ashley still live in the same place, a super cute mid-century home perfect for making memories.

Before Ashley moved in, Justin and I decorated the house like a bachelor pad. On the porch, we hung a bunch of old road signs. Above Justin’s bed, he hung a big poster that said FCUK, which stands for French Connection United Kingdom. (For some reason, Ashley took it down.) On my bathroom door, we hung a sign Justin bought on Ebay that was originally intended for a ski lift. It says, “Unload here.” (I still think it’s funny.)

After dinner tonight, the three of us started talking about how we all met, and Ashley told me she was pretty sure they wouldn’t have ended up together had it not been for my dance studio. Well, this was news to me because I thought they met when Justin wandered into Ashley’s work. And although that is indeed the case, they apparently didn’t introduce themselves that day. But later one of Ashley’s friends invited her to come to a dance at my studio, and when Justin just happened to walk through the door, Ashley turned to her friend and said, “That’s the guy who came into the store earlier, the one I was telling you about.” And her friend said, “Oh, that’s Justin.”

And the rest is history.

As Ashley was telling their story, one of my favorite memories from Justin’s house came to mind. It was 2010, and we were having a gigantic yard sale as a fundraiser for a swing dance convention the studio was sponsoring. Well, one of the people who showed up that day was the original owner of Justin’s house, so I invited the man inside, and we walked around together. He told me the room I was sleeping in used to be the master, that’s where he and his wife slept. “The kids slept over there across the hall. The piano was on that wall in the living room,” he said.

And then we went into the garage, and he pointed out the large, rectangular cabinets along one side that Justin and I used for storage, each cabinet taller than I am, each with a hinged door. The man said he used to work at a casket company, and those cabinets were the boxes the cabinets were shipped in. (I mean, how cool is that?)

I think about that story every now and then, and it reminds me to have perspective. I have so many wonderful memories at Justin and Ashley’s house. For several years, that was my world, the home I could drive to without thinking about it. But my memories are only part of the story of that house, a single line in a beautiful song. As much as that house means to me, I can only assume it means so much more to that man, to Justin, to Ashley.

This was sort of the theme of the evening, an idea Justin and I kept circling back to after Ashley went to bed, this notion that we never know the full impact of a dance studio, a home, a person. I told Justin I recently received a thank-you letter of sorts from a new friend who said they were glad I was in the area. And I said that even though I’d wanted to be somewhere else at this time in my life, obviously there were good things coming from my being right here, right now.

Justin said that it’s nice when we’re allowed a glimpse “behind the veil,” and he thought that things like this were happening all the time, we just don’t know it.

I love that phrase, behind the veil. I know that personally I often get caught up in judging things as they appear on the surface. While I had the dance studio, I judged it as a success or failure based on the number of people who showed up or the amount of money in my bank account each week. But as I look at it now, it’s enough for me that two people were there, that they were there on the same night in the spring of 2009, and that they fell in love.

One time my therapist told me, “Not everything is about you, Marcus.” Well, if you have even a little bit of an ego, a statement like this can come as a real shock. And I don’t even remember the context in which she said it, but I’m sure she was right. (There, I admitted it. It’s in writing.) But honestly, as I think about it now, there’s a lot of peace in a statement like that. In my experience, it’s so easy to judge your life or your business as a success or failure based on how you look or how much money you make. But when it’s not about you, you open yourself up to a much bigger perspective, a perspective behind the veil. And there you can see how all our lives connect, the ways in which we give to each other without even knowing it, and what a beautiful song we are.