Small Towns and Connections

(Note:  The issues that others have complained about on the InterWeb about Blogger not playing nicely with comments and replies seems to have finally arrived at my door.  Apologies in advances for unusual formatting or an untimely delay in response.)

One of the things that one can forget in living in a larger city is how interconnected a small town can be.

I am from a small town - the population has increased significantly in the rather long amount of time since I grew up there, but it is still likely considered a "small town" and will probably always, partially because of the fact that due to geography, they have run out of places to build more.  And while I, like many, left at some point to go to school and then later to work, there are many who simply stayed and never left.

Neither is necessarily good or bad of course; opportunities exist beyond where one grew up that never existed there, but opportunities and way of life that is familiar and related exist can exist where one grew up as well.  US culture is often biased for the first option (maybe other countries as well) in that the modern civilized perception is that if you do not migrate to a big urban area, you are 

"missing out".  In some ways that is not wrong of course, and small towns can be petty, spiteful, and limiting - just as larger towns and cities can be dehumanizing and dangerous.  A lot depends on where you are and who you associate with.

One of the few useful items for Social Media is that one can connect with people that one has not seen in many years even if one was from a small town and moved away.  It seems harmless enough - for the most part, everyone is fairly respectful and mostly posts "what I or my kids are doing now" photos, which is fine.  And at some level, it is always interesting or amusing (to me) where people are and what they are doing.

In paging through the "Updates" or "News" or whatever it is called, I was thus alerted to the fact that one of the daughters' of our across-the-street neighbors had gone to A Magical Place.  She was several years behind me so I remember her, although never saw her after elementary school.  She had moved back to the small town we were both from, and was staying at here parents.  

She went to A Magical Place with a friend.  I checked out the name - then almost dropped the mouse. The name was the last name of someone I had gone from Kindergarten to High School with.  I checked - sure enough, it was one of his kids. 

So then, of course, I go to check her page.  Social Media will "helpfully" let you know shared connections.  It turns out that she and one of my cousins are connected, a cousin I had not seen for 20 years until last February at a shared funeral for TB The Elder's Sister.

I had no idea any of these people knew each other.  How this all happened is, I suppose, a story unto itself.

Connections.

In the modern world, I suppose it is called "Networking", although I would argue that networking has much more of a me-first ring to it.  Inherently, networking is not just done for the sake of connecting with people as it is done for the "what they might be able to do in the future" aspect, whether it be a job, a sale, or an inside connection.  In business of course it makes sense:  there is a real truth to the concept of who you know matters as much as what you know.  

I would argue that at least for me - and perhaps this is my own failing - that there is no such "connectedness" in large cities.  Partially because there are just too many people: one might know one's neighbors, perhaps those that are in some association, club, or hobby that one is involved in, perhaps one's choice of worship locations.  But the chances that these various people are at all connected is almost infinitesimal, given the size and scope of modern cities.  If such a thing happens, it is by random chance more than likelihood.

Of course, I can see where the argument of parochialism would come in - smaller population, more people knowing other people's business - and in that sense a large city offers a sort of anonymity that smaller towns might not have.  And this does not add on the additional layer of a highly mobile population which I would think is more prone to finding itself in larger cities, people arriving and leaving without time to set up any kind of roots which would make such connections possible.

I do not suppose there is really a point to today's post in the sense of "I have arrived at a conclusion" or some pithy statement of purpose or revelation.  More of just a comparison that I am suddenly reminded of between where I have lived and where I now live, and how (perhaps if were are just left to ourselves) connected we may actually be.