I couldn't sleep, and this is what was wandering around in my head...
First off, as much as I'd love to be original, the aka thing I stole from Creation is Crucifixion. What a great band.
Let's start off with a random fact: approximately 107 billion people have lived on planet earth so far. I didn't know this while I couldn't sleep, but as I laid in bed I was imagining billions and billions of timelines for all the people that have ever lived on this planet. These timelines could be decades long for the people that made it into old age; incredibly short for those that never made it out of infancy or died very young; and everything in between. In my little vision, none of these timelines were a straight line. Instead they created a weaving, intricate web that involved all of their interactions with every human being they'd ever met and/or encountered. These interactions could be as coworkers, family, lovers, classmates, randomly walking by someone on the street, being served or serving someone at a bar/coffee shop/restaurant, and on and on and on. What I was thinking the most about, though, were the encounters that eventually lead to friendship.
Quick, relevant, diversion:
Facebook provides some interesting opportunities. Living abroad, it's great for keeping in touch with people back home. It's also provides the chance to connect with old classmates and childhood friends, some of whom I've had little or no contact with for 20 years or more. For most of them, when I see them post something, I'm struck by how there's still an overlap in interests that would make friendship really easy to resume if we were living in the same city. As a kid, I thought I was choosing my friends because they let me play Nintendo at their house, wanted to shoot hoops, or maybe ride bikes. However, throughout my time in school there were plenty of kids that liked riding bikes, playing video games, and shooting hoops, but I was only friends with a very small number of them. It's fascinating to think that even from a young age there is likely a lot more to how we choose our friends than we might understand at the time.
Back to my web:
At the advent of humanity as we know it the web was very small and likely uncomplicated. As each new timeline started for each person to make an appearance on earth, the web would continue to grow larger and more complicated, all the way up to the present where there are around 7 billion timelines that are starting, works in progress, and stopping. For each individual, their timeline will only intersect with an incredibly small percentage of that 7 billion. In general we can imagine it as a bell curve, in the sense that some people will interact with a lot more people, some a lot less, and there's probably a general number that starts coming close to an average. Google actually had surprising little to say about the subject, but I did see one web page that suggests that if you live to 90, you might meet around 100,000 people in your lifetime, and that was supposedly being generous.
Think about your own life, and how many of those 100,000 people will ever be your friends at any point in your life, and then break it down further to how many will actually be life long friends that you know you can always count on. It likely comes down to a number that you can count on one or two hands. If you can add your toes, than you are likely someone very special. Basically, out of the billions of people on this planet, we will only interact with a very small percentage of them, and of that small percentage, it's an incredibly tiny percentage that we will call friends.
Going even further, when you think about the 107 billion people that have called this planet home, and every choice that they ever made, which resulted in the incredibly vast sequence of events that resulted in you being born, and the incredibly vast sequence of events that led to your friends being born, and everything that had to happen so that you ended up in the same city, and/or went to the same school, or had the same friends, or happened to travel to the same destination, to me it's amazing that we ever met at all, and even better that we became friends (and this is where it gets a little harder to write). I usually try to avoid words like fate and destiny, but as I lay in bed thinking last night, I was got caught up in the fact that everything that has happened that led me to that exact moment, absolutely had to happen, otherwise that moment wouldn't exist. But it did exist, so everything that has happened, had to happen. Sorry, that is super redundant. But when I think about the people closest to me, if I try to subtract one of them from the equation, then every moment from that time on is different, which means that nothing else that has happened since that meeting could ever happen. The conclusion being that I was meant to meet every one that I have met (By the way, I'm aware of the circles I'm typing myself around).
The point being:
I guess that's what I mean by retroactive destiny. For those who have impacted my life the most, I wasn't thinking about fate bringing us together in the moment. Though, if I was in my early 20s, I was likely stoned, and probably should have. However, you have now become an inextricable part of my timeline, and none of the person I am, or where I am now is possible without you. I think that is one other thing that friendship does. We all have our own timeline, but as we go, we leave and collect imprints, a shadow of sorts, on those that really touch our lives that we carry with us as we go. There are so many of you that have left your mark on me, and I carry that with me always.
