At the Grammys, as Tracy Chapman sang “Fast Car,” her eyes sparkled. Equally in evidence was a beaming Luke Combs. For Luke Combs to get the notoriously private Tracy Chapman to join him on stage at the Grammy Awards took some masterful bridge building.

In our lives, we are building or maintaining bridges all day long, even, as in this lovely poem, when we smile back at sticky children in grocery lines.

Think of all the times, you’ve talked with friends about the latest movie or show you’ve seen or dropped lines from movies in conversation. These lines become shorthand in our daily script, conveying meaning or signaling something about ourselves.

After all these years, Mandy Patinkin can still easily recite his most famous lines from The Princess Bride movie. But they’re not the words that mean the most to him.

Many people are traveling home for Christmas or other family gatherings this weekend. For some this is an easy time, something they look forward to. For others it can be challenging, fraught with tension. For those, what can be safe to talk about?

“It’s a moment of undoing.” Hearing this short phrase, that so powerfully captures the pain and erasure inherent in stereotyping, took my breath away.

Hearing how it applied to autistic people – “If you’ve met one autistic person, you have met one autistic person.” – was a wake-up call for me. It expanded my sense of how easy it is to stereotype all sorts of people, and how quickly I may fall into this. An important reminder for me.

Bridges are not easy things to build. They are certainly not built overnight. And sometimes a bridge that we’ve taken for granted – a connection we always thought would be there – is washed away in a storm.