72 | February 2012 | woman this month L iving on a tiny patch of island, about 750 square kilometres, on a planet with a total land mass of 150 million square kilometers; at times, this Hard-headed Woman feels quite alone and cut off from the rest of the world. Then, like a bolt of lightning, I am reminded how tiny the globe on which we cohabitate really is and what this can mean for us. I’m sure that you have all heard the famed term, “six degrees of separation”. There was, after all, a highly successful Hollywood blockbuster based on its premise. The idea of the six degrees is based upon the work of the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, who talked about a similar idea in his 1929 short story Chains. To put it simply, his idea was that due to the world’s population growth and the rate that we now travel, the great distances between us are shrinking. As humanity becomes more dense, social distances become smaller. In even fewer words, “the world is shrinking”. The “six degrees of separation” theory suggests that if you selected any one person out of the billions of inhabitants on the Earth, you could find a way to contact them, going through no more than five other people, each an acquaintance of one of the others, and the first being an acquaintance of your own. In other words, you could get to them through six steps. Last week, I experienced the smallness of the world for myself and it really hit home. Enjoying a social evening out, I met a fellow “femme fatale”, amongst our group. We chatted. She had lived in London, Paris, Tokyo and originated from New Zealand. I am not from her country, yet had worked there on and off in the early nineties. We discussed people for whom we had both worked at locations within the same country. Her curiosity and mine peaked as we narrowed down times and places. As we chatted, our lives entwined to be just degrees apart, until finally we connected at the same point. In the end, it turned out that her current BFF (best friend forever), is the daughter of the people that I had been employed by many years before. A chance encounter at a party by two people, one who has lived here for the better part of a decade, the other having only just arrived from Paris, both originating from different countries, actually knowing the same people in New Zealand. I love this about our world. Despite the distances and chance encounters, despite the languages and the differences between cultures, we are not really that different. We are linked, all of us by just a few degrees of humanity. Now if ever there was a need and reason for us all to be kind to one another, surely that is it. Somewhere, somehow, unexpectedly, we all know one another, here and in other countries through our personal connections. And that makes this chick want to set off and meet as many people as possible from now on, and to be nice to all of them. When most of us can’t travel home every year to see our parents and loved ones, it’s nice to think that talking to other people can bring us degrees closer through our common interests and interactions to mutual friends, acquaintances and family. That fills me with happiness and makes me content to remain here in Bahrain. We are just a few degrees from absolutely everybody else and on Valentine’s Day, that makes me feel love for everybody. WoMentality Hard-headed Woman Degrees
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