It’s a Small World After All
A few days ago, my daughter Madeline stepped out of her apartment building in Montclair, New Jersey to take a walk. She remembered it was Tuesday when she saw a neat pile of bulky waste on the curb outside her complex. Madeline being Madeline, she veered off her path to take a little gander at the pile of other people’s stuff on the curb and much to her surprise and delight, she spied an open cardboard box that seemed to be filled with letters and other personal items. A veritable treasure, she thought, and without hesitation, picked it up and took it inside to get a better look. What she found in the box stunned and delighted her: 50 years worth of thoughtful hand-written letters, postcards, newspaper clippings, a cassette tape or two and most shockingly, four actual college degrees, including a doctoral degree from The University of Iowa, all with the same name.
Her first thought was that this person had died and that for whatever reason, her important papers had been unceremoniously discarded on the street. A quick Google search assured her that this was not the case. The woman was alive and well—a published author, a college professor, an academic well-known in her field, it seemed. Madeline then looked to see if she was on Facebook and lo and behold, there she was—and even better, they had a mutual friend—our dear friend, Katie. Well, you can guess what happens next. Katie, who lives 3000 miles away in Los Angeles, helped put Madeline in touch with the woman, who also lives in Montclair. The woman came to Madeline’s home yesterday and gratefully collected her treasures.
It is, in fact, a small world.
This event makes me think of so many other little coincidences and unexpected connections between people in my own life. Like that time I was having lunch with a colleague in New York when I was in my early 20’s and we discovered that her Oberlin College boyfriend, Peter (the one she talked about incessantly) was actually the very same Peter that my college boyfriend in Oregon had grown up with in California and with whom I had sat next to at a wedding in Oregon only one summer earlier. Or that woman I met on a New York-Portland flight, who said she was from Whidbey Island, Washington and asked if I knew of it. When I said yes, I spent a few weeks there when I was in junior high school to go to a track camp at a place called Camp Casey. Had she heard of it? Yes, she replied, because she and her husband had actually purchased the camp 30 years ago to create an inn. Or, just a few weeks ago, chatting with a new art teacher in my high school in New Jersey, only to discover, after a series of conversational twists and turns, that one of her best friends from art school in Brooklyn, actually worked with my daughter at a New York creative agency for many years.
Small world indeed. Made smaller by technology, of course, but also by curiosity and good will.
The theory of six degrees of separation suggests that any person on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. Believe it or not, this idea appeared first in 1929, in a short story entitled “Chains” by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy. According to the story, during a night of “energetic” debate in which Karinthy and his pals were marveling at the ways that modern transportation had “shrunk” the world, they decided to conduct an experiment to see how many people it would take to contact any given stranger in the world. After some time, they determined that no-one in the group needed more than five links in the chain to connect with any other given person in the world.
That, of course, was nearly 100 years ago and according to Facebook, who explored this very question in 2016, the degree of separation between every human on our planet has shrunk to a number much closer to 3 (NYT). Three degrees of separation. Wow. If you do a little dive into this question via the internet, you will see lots of cool explanations about how this works, but one of the most compelling I found is an idea termed, the strength of weak ties (Youtube video). This idea suggests that the connections that matter most in this spectacular web of interconnectedness are the casual connections we make or what we might think of as the weak ties in our social networks. It is these connections—the neighbor you know in passing, the acquaintance from the gym, your seatmate on the flight from JFK to PDX—that create bridges between the clusters of our more substantial long-term connections, which are often deeply rooted in family, friendship, work and community networks. So, the casual conversation between the new art teacher and I, considered at that point, a weak tie, is what enabled us to discover the very substantial connection between her friend and my daughter, thus changing the nature of our weak tie into a more substantial—and mutually valued—real connection.
Maybe because I am wildly curious about new people and often engage in surprisingly personal conversations with strangers and acquaintances, or maybe because I just love the idea that we are all deeply connected in one way or another, I find this idea both comforting and exciting. And even more exciting to me is the idea that we can cultivate and nurture these connections—we can make actually make our weak ties stronger. How? By being curious about the people we meet, by being present enough to share the parts of ourselves that may reveal our common ground and, maybe, just by having the faith and simple good will to be open to the possibilities inherent in just about every interaction.
