Just Intertwined…

A week and a half ago I passed by my movie guys place to pick up some series that could take me through the weekend considering I had scheduled spending it largely indoors. Sampling through his library collection, I picked up Six Degrees; featuring the lives of six people as they go about their daily lives without realizing the impact they are having on one another and how all six of their lives are intertwined. By Sunday evening when I finished watching it, not only was I hooked and wanting more but I was witnessing the possibilities that you could basically know everybody around everybody or everybody you know.

This made me start analyzing my family, my friends, acquaintances, colleagues and the random people that I engage with each and every time at business meetings, conferences… everywhere, even travel. Look at it this way, every time you get to a cocktail party downtown, hosted by a certain service oriented or support company for clients, church across town, clubs and theme nights… You will establish that in that gathering, in a population of an approximate fifty people, you know at least five or more people. These five people know some other people that you know, and the people you know probably know some people they know.

A further look at my face book profile helped establish more. Of my five hundred or so friends, that are adding up every single day since I joined about three hundred days ago, we have common friendships that unnecessarily developed the same time. Or place. These friends know other people I know, be it neighbors, colleagues, relatives, ex girl friends… as a matter of fact, when I moved houses not so long ago, I got my annoying sales lady neighbor’s names and went searching for her on face book, just to satisfy my curiosity… I was not even surprised, we had 23 friends in common despite having never schooled together, worked together, shared neighborhoods or anything else in common. Wondering? Hey, even Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are supposedly relatives!!! How now?

What I am I saying, there is relative possibility that you are linked to the person next to you through someone else you know or someone else who knows someone else that you know and so on and so forth. Then the possibility that the challenges and experiences that you encounter every day break and rest from every day end are very much alive with the next person… As a matter of my undying curiosity, I even decided 2 observe the way people carry themselves around town, from the estates to the lifts. There is always a brave face, for many there is that smile that says I am good, the others give that stale face indicating their seriousness with stuff.

I remember my Computer Networks class at my post graduate dip class… and the distribution and relation chains in Entrepreneurship. Just as they are linked, so is humanity. We are linked by people we know, people we work with or people we are related to. Further interlinking is realized with what we do, where we go and how we do. We work on the basis of people we know. That’s why every now and then we are always asked to provide referees, people who can recommend us and people we can recommend. When sending your daughter to school, definitely friend so and so will refer you to madam so and so, because that friend knows that the madam can get you a place in that certain school; in that school your daughter will meet a certain friend, they will bond and on parents day you will meet parents, who work for so and so with him and her that you happen to know, over time you will even discover that your daughters friends actually know your wife’s sister…It’s a whole network.

We share common problems and solutions. Yesterday, I spent most of my day hustling for cash to pay some fees for my studies; when I got to the offices of the place I had been referred to by a colleague, I met a childhood sweetheart that made me fight lots for the position of ‘father’ whenever she played ‘mother’ in the ‘chababa na chamama’ child games… The lady happens to be dating my college roommate now!!! How small can the world get…? By five pm, after making some friends and meeting new people in the process, I ran into this lady at our car park. I had seen her at some friends’ offices as they served some buffet last year. Having been impressed with their food, I had taken her number and recommended her to a friend’s friend who was wedding last November. A quick chat with her resulted to her borrowing some negligible cash… she was desperate even to get home and had lost her job her former employer having closed business recently… funny enough I had to refer her back to my colleague who guided me to finances for possibilities of him getting her a slot at his restaurant…

It’s all complicated…