A MATTER OF DEGREE
Thursday, February 4, 2021 - daily column #6658
Are you close, or still far away?
Getting warmer, hot, cold, near, far – those Six Degrees of Separation, a concept we used to know as a measurement of distance in relationships – part physical distancing, part intellectual.
Someone wrote the play, someone made a movie – we got it, that among all our contacts, they all have theirs, and so on, and so on …
A sneeze or sniffle now causes worry when that used to be a minor Kleenex inconvenience. Sea of living or workplaces, our ‘bubble(s)’ overlap other bubbles, ultimate Venn diagrams of connections – that we might be potential spreaders, or catchers, of any virus. If in doubt that you’ve changed your attitude, see what happens when you catch a cold next time, and witness how worried you immediately become.
Diagram-dioramas – to map the source of a COVID-19 infection spread?
Maybe a third-degree blazing fever, second-degree burns – or first-degree heart murmur – we don’t want to get too close, but do we really know how close we are?
Distance hasn’t changed, but velocity surely has. E-mail travels at the speed of electricity/light. How long, or far, can be answered in nanoseconds.
I was doing some database updates recently, looking at some contacts on LinkedIn, and it is apparent to me we are don’t have six degrees of separation anymore. Unless we are hermits and deliberately invisible online, we are potentially in touch with or reachable by anyone. It’s different.
Most people don’t post a phone number. If they do, you won’t find it in most landline directories or reverse-lookups that connect to an address … but most people don’t realize their data is being gathered every day by Google and Amazon, or any others we connect with: zero degrees of separation if we consider we are all connected to these giants, or Twitter or Facebook.
If we’ve not been hacked or had our identity sold to some mailing lists and spam-bombers – it’s just a matter of time. Whatever consumes the world today often spreads like wildfires do, burning lots of fuel but not doing much good. We live in a scorched-earth world of politics, opinion, fears, and rants.
Let’s, instead, focus on doing one good thing every day.
Don’t aim for two until you’ve mastered one.
One thing.
Do it.
One thing for someone else, and in the doing, you are doing for yourself too.
This might seem like a tiny nuance – remember I’m no professional of the mind, no head-doctor to give advice – but it seems to me, especially now, if I can point to one thing every day that was special, intentional, rooted in just trying to help someone else … by the end of the day, if the total tangible value of everything else from that day is zero, then the total is one thing!
Forget six-degrees.
Focus on one.
One on one.
You. And anyone.
|