Connections....

Since I didn’t know how many opportunities I would have in China to blog, I’ve lined up a few guest posts for you. Here is the first one, from an esteemed former co-worker best known as Pindham. 

When the woman best known to you as Dixiechick, asked me to write a guest post for her blog, I couldn’t help but think about the strange, real-world web of connections that made this post you are reading possible. What’s the likelihood that I would end up working at an HBCU in rural Georgia, meeting and collaborating with a Professor from the Netherlands, and then writing a guest post for her after I had moved on to south Florida and she had flown to a summer session in China? Well, that precise combination of people, events, and situations is quite likely totally unique in all of history, but that it indeed happened is so totally commonplace as to be almost trivial. Most of the connections in life are just this miraculous, which makes them so very ordinary. It’s this mix of the miraculous and ordinary that I want to think on for a moment.

It seems to me that each moment in life is a nexus of different arcs of energy all on different trajectories and paces. Each arc is a person, event, or artifact that is itself a nexus of other arcs, and all these arcs converge moment by moment to make me what I am. I am the precipitate, to use Randall Collins’ term, of all these arcs and forces, or to put it in terms of complexity theory, I am the pattern that emerges from all those arcs. Such weaving in and out of the different strands, of course, makes each moment miraculous—yet we resist that miracle and fold it into the common light of day.

I suppose we have to. If we were constantly stunned by the novelty of life, then we would hardly ever get anything done. If I were to be amazed that just now I am writing a passage that has never before been written to people who have never before read these words from me, I would never be able to write. We have to subsume the miraculous into the commonplace so that we can get on with things.

So we do. We abstract the miraculous into recognizable, manageable patterns, and we get on with the business of life.

But every so often, something or someone reminds us of how rare each moment really is. A friend says that she’s going to China for the summer and needs you to write a guest post for her. So you pause to think about the strangeness of that ordinary request: that the strand of your own life is being woven through a trip to China, and that is just one link, one connection, one strand in the warp and weft of your own weave. It’s just an ordinary miracle, I know, but I really appreciate that a blonde Dutch woman from the deep south is woven through my weave and I through hers. It makes for a much more interesting pattern, one that I never could have predicted or fabricated on my own.

Thanks, DC, and take lots of pix.