What better way to kick off my new blog than with a story as old as time? If I were to tally up the number of times I’ve heard the phrase, “It’s a small world,” in my life, it would probably be at least four digits long. When I’d hear that saying as a kid, I always shrugged it off. The world is HUGE! Obviously my mother was just being sarcastic. We ran into a complete stranger in Disney World and what do you know!? They are from the same town back in Staten Island that we are!
Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands of “coincidences.” My wife and I met online. We lived an hour away in different states. At our wedding, two random people looked at each other with familiarity. They tried remembering where they knew each other from. It didn’t hit them until after. My mother’s best friend since childhood was at our wedding with her husband. Great people. He is a psychiatrist. It turns out one of his patients was my father-in-law’s best friend.
That’s just one of many instances I’ve seen over the years where someone who hears the story undeniably utters, “What a small world.”
Recently I thought to myself – what if it truly is a small world? I’ve always laughed at the phrase. With over 8 billion people on this planet, it is obviously a very large world. But is it really? At 36 years of age, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is in fact a small world! My younger self would marvel at the number of coincidences I’d encounter. The truth is that we’re connected in one way or another to more people than we ever thought. If you chat with a stranger on the street today, I guarantee you’ll have more in common with them than you’d ever imagine.
Maybe it’s as simple as this: we’re human. We have a spiritual connection. I’m not sure, but I do know that yes it is a small world. Smaller than I used to think it was. After all. It’s the human connection that keeps us tied together in a long line of experiences which disguise themselves as coincidences. I wonder what would happen if we lost that human element. It’s not like there’s a threat to that. There’s no other artificial form of intelligence lurking in the shadows…is there? That’s a story for another day.
-Ken