This time of year, my social media feed is filled with pictures of parents taking their kids to college. There are pictures of dorm rooms, cars packed with far too much stuff, families standing in front of college signs, and parents talking about the mixture of pride and sadness that comes with driving away and leaving a child behind.

I have been seeing those pictures for years, but this year I started noticing something I hadn’t really thought about before. Many of the parents posting those pictures are people I knew when they were college students. Some were my students, some worked with me, and some became friends over the years. I remember them long before they were Mom and Dad taking their own child to college.

And in some cases, I remember how Mom and Dad met.

Decisions That Didn’t Seem Important

When you work with college students, you make hundreds of little decisions that don’t seem particularly consequential at the time. You decide who should live together, who should be part of a particular group, who might be a good Resident Assistant, or who you should invite to come work with you.

I can remember making roommate assignments and deciding to put certain people together. I can remember inviting students to work with me or bringing people into a group who otherwise might never have crossed paths. At the time, I wasn’t contemplating anyone’s future family tree. I was trying to fill a room, hire somebody, build a team, or solve whatever problem happened to be sitting in front of me that day.

But relationships came out of those decisions. Roommates became friends, friends introduced other friends, coworkers spent time together, and circles of people began to overlap. Somewhere along the way, some of those connections resulted in two people meeting who eventually fell in love and got married.

Obviously, I don’t get credit for the marriage. They did the hard work of falling in love, choosing each other, building a life together, and creating a family. But it is fascinating to realize that sometimes I made a small decision that helped create the circumstances in which their lives crossed.

And Now Their Kids Are Going to College

Looking at all of these pictures, I started thinking backward. The students I remember are now sending their own children off to college, and some of those children exist because of relationships that began through a chain of connections I had a tiny role in creating decades ago.

It is a little mind-bending when you really think about it. A decision that may have taken me thirty seconds to make years ago eventually became one small link in a chain that led to a marriage, a family, and now another young person beginning their own college experience.

And that young person is about to make connections of their own. They will have roommates, classmates, coworkers and friends. They will make decisions and accept invitations that seem completely ordinary at the time, and some of those decisions may shape the rest of their lives.

We Don’t Know Which Decisions Matter

I think we tend to imagine that the decisions that shape our lives are the big ones. We think about choosing a college, accepting a job, deciding where to live, getting married, or making a major career change. Those decisions certainly matter, but I am increasingly convinced that our lives are also shaped by hundreds of tiny decisions that nobody recognizes as important when they happen.

You decide where someone will sit. You introduce two people. You offer someone a job. You invite someone to come along. You put two students in the same residence hall room because, for whatever reason, it seems like a good match.

Then life takes over.

One relationship leads to another, which leads to another. People make choices you could never have anticipated, and eventually the consequences of that ordinary decision stretch far beyond anything you could have imagined when you made it.

A Hundred Years From Now

This is the part that has really captured my imagination. Some of the children I am seeing head off to college today will eventually have children of their own. Some of those children will have children, and the family tree will continue growing long after all of us who were there at the beginning are gone.

That means there could be people living a hundred or even two hundred years from now whose existence can be traced, through a long and complicated chain of events, back to a roommate assignment or an invitation to come work with me.

Of course, nobody in that family is going to be sitting around Thanksgiving dinner in 2175 talking about the housing decision Brandon Hill made back in the 1990s. At least I certainly hope they have more interesting things to talk about by then. But whether anyone remembers the decision doesn’t change the fact that it happened or that it helped set other things in motion.

That makes me wonder how many similar decisions have shaped my own life. Somewhere in my family history, someone decided to go somewhere, introduce two people, offer someone an opportunity, or simply invite someone along. They could not possibly have known that centuries later one of the consequences of that choice would be me sitting here writing about it.

The Things We Will Never See

I have spent most of my career working with college students, and higher education loves things we can measure. We count enrollment, retention, graduation, participation, and dozens of other outcomes. Those things are important, and I have spent plenty of my life trying to improve them.

But I am becoming increasingly convinced that some of the most significant outcomes of our work will never appear in a report. We influence lives through relationships, introductions, invitations, encouragement, opportunities, and sometimes through decisions so routine that we forget making them.

Every once in a while, though, we get a glimpse of where one of those decisions led. For me, this year’s glimpse has come through pictures of former students taking their children to college. I look at the parents, remember the young people they once were, and occasionally realize that I remember some of the circumstances that brought them together.

It makes those old decisions feel very different now.

More importantly, it makes me think differently about the decisions I am making today. Most of them will probably remain exactly what they appear to be: ordinary choices made during an ordinary day. But every once in a while, one of those little decisions may start a chain of events that continues for generations.

We just don’t get to know which one.