Six degrees of separation (also referred to as the "Human Web") refers to the idea that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. (From Wikipedia).
I have been able to go back to thinking about things lately. The work project that engrossed me was suddenly complete and I found myself with some "time" on my hands. I got to looking around on Facebook and "found" some old friends on the FB pages of other friends. After making contact with these old friends, I got to thinking about that "6 degrees of separation thing". Truly we are part of a bigger "family" in the sense that we are connected in ways that we have never really pondered. It's about information or rather access to information. It is about connections..."hey, you are related to Bob...or I didn't know you knew Dave and Sally...yeah, we were in the same church for a while or our kids played soccer together....". One of the things that saddens me is the fact that many times I find about of the passing of a friend from years back. Memories are triggered of that person and then the wondering about their last days. A deeper sadness occurs if their death came by their own hand. What despair wracked them during those last days, I wonder to myself.One of my personality traitsis that of one who feels and so I feel at that moment those things that I would have felt back when the event actually happened.
34 years ago I graduated from college and I kept a core of friends from those days. We talked and wrote letters, spoke on occasion by telephone or ran into each other while visiting family or friends. In the middle 90's I got my first computer and an AOL account and suddenly email opened up a new world for me. Cell phones soon followed and then texting....computers became smaller and then we adults discovered MySpace followed by Facebook, then Twitter....well that's as far as I have gotten. There's other stuff...stuff that I don't have time to investigate. I have so much information, just a few keystrokes away. It astounds and baffles me at times. Yet, there is an element missing....
My youngest daughter recently posted a request on her Facebook page for letters. I sat down and wrote one...Lord, I can't tell you the last time I had performed that actvity. It was an effort to write a page and a half...but, I did it and mailed it to her and she was pleased. It takes little effort to do these things...handwriting letters, calling someone just to say "I'm thinking of you". It used to be that we grew up finsihed school, went off to college or the military, then came back home to work in the family business, teach school or establish a new business around people who knew us or knew our folks. Not so today. We are more likely to take jobs away from our home base unless we grew up in a major metropolitan area. Trips home are replaced with emails, texts and cell phone calls and maybe even Skype sessions. However, none of this satisfies the longing for the human touch; the hug of a family member, the soothing hand of comfort from your friend of 30 plus years, the feeling of just knowing that you are where you matter.
I enjoy my connections via social networking; I marvel at the friends that I have who know each other, but not through or because of me. I like the feeling of being connected to others. In the end it matters not how you got be friends or that you are connected in this 6 degree way...it just matters that you are!
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