2 posts tagged “friends”

An intriguing site that should while away quite a few hours, especially if you right-click and open in new window to see each and every entry! One hundred young photographers posted images they'd taken of those they love - a slice-of-life, slice-of-viewpoint look into the worlds of others.

Still on the Census. As I was driving around the suburbs yesterday, trailing behind my census collector friend as he toiled up yet another steep driveway, I looked around at the neighbourhood and there, across the road, was another collector.

You see, the way census collectors work is to be given "blocks" of suburbs, incorporating about 175 houses on numbers of streets. The collectors travel counter-clockwise around their streets, following very particular rules.

This other fellow was travelling counter-clockwise around his "block", collecting the completed forms, too. Well, why not ... it was a lovely 22 degree (Celsius) day, so a good time to get it done.

Imagine my surprise, though, when I recognised him! Now, I live in Adelaide - a city of over a million. What are the odds of encountering - on a sunny Sunday afternoon, helping one friend on a task that's done only once every five years - a person whom you knew quite well nearly 15 years ago, and who's doing the same task? I had worked with John (the other collector) for nearly 10 years and had seen him on a daily basis. We'd exchanged many a risque joke, sat on the same committees, worked on some of the same projects.

It seems to me that we really do live in a small world. Even when we occupy big cities, our personal community often resembles a village-sized area. We tend to have one or more groups of friends who, though they may be scattered across a wide geographical area, are still within what we think of as our "tribe". And where we can't be physically present, we still form communities, such as this one afforded by Vox, and the group over at Istockphoto.com.

For all the ability we have to move around the planet in very short order, I reckon we mostly still spend the major (and most significant) parts of our lives in the "small place, this world".