It's a small world after all...

We all know that the world is quite large, okay not as large as the sun but large enough. There are 195 countries and an estimated six billion people living in them, so we expect that in our lives we are only given a tiny glimpse of what this glorious planet has to offer.

Assuming that idea is true we are often surprised when world seems to be smaller than we think. We can discover unexplained coincidences, and strange occurrences where our perception of the world's size is altered. Recently I have found many of these surrounding other people in my life. I went away to University and met new people from all over the United Kingdom and found that one of my new classmates was dating a guy from my secondary school. They are now living together not far from me! I have recently re-met an old acquaintance and found that they live round the corner from my grandparents! You can bump into old friends after years have gone past and they already know your new best friend. A famous idea that relates to this is the 'six degrees of separation' concept created by Frigyes Karinthy and then written into a play by John Guare. It is 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.'

With social networking sites like Facebook it is often quite easy to see how this concept works with the 'mutual friends' feature. We are often surprised at how our friends from one area of our life know others from a completely unrelated area.

Whether these concepts and occurrences are all just coincidences not to be analysed or explained, remains the question. I seem to overuse the world 'random' when describing something that I find surprising or out of the ordinary. While some may argue that everything is random, I am then without a word to describe what such affairs mean.

Without an explanation and not even sure if I need one I am left to realise that It's a small world after all and in the words of the Disneyland Attraction, 'It's a world of laughter, A world of tears. It's a world of hopes, And a world of fears. There's so much that we share, That it's time we're aware, It's a small world after all.'