It is so easy to forget just how small the world is. Within the 6 billion people milling around I do believe there are networks…chains that link bodies and personalities to each other. I don’t believe 6 degrees of separation is just for kevin bacon.
Completely unscientific proof of this was illustrated for me on google. It started off vainly enough, googling myself. but instead of the usual way, I hit the “feeling lucky” button to see how it might differ. From there I moved on to people I haven’t spoken to in years. It was a novelty idea, “how easily could s/he be found.”
Amid my playing I discovered a friend’s name (pretty unusual so I high probability it is my friend) and in scaling through the dense document to see the business affiliation I discovered another friend on the same sheet. It was a vast document for some sort of career fair. Unimportant really except…
Except that two people who conceivably don’t know each other but do know me sitting in a room conducting completely unrelated business.
And it is this tiny insignificant connect. Unimportant really…but I find it fascinating. Like sitting on the steps of my university freshman year and having a girl from my middle school (a military base middle school no less) call out my name in recognition. Or sitting in training in a rural village in south Africa and getting a phone call from someone from college who was not far away…
It’s a small world after all…