As of 2013 the world population was 7.12 billion people. That number is hard to even fathom. But every once and awhile the world feels extremely small to me. Why is that? It is because of intersections between people, culture, ideals, and objects. Intersections bring together this vast over-populated Earth.
On a tiny street on the Almafi Coast, I had to hop off a bus to use the bathroom. At the time, I didn’t think about how I would leave this tiny town in the middle of nowhere, after jumping off the only bus for hours. My friend was unhappy with me, we had a wonderful day planned in Positano, Italy and now we were stuck in the middle of nowhere. I started trying to hitchhike. Sports cars filled with nicely dressed Italians and tourists zoomed by, it seemed like we were gonna spend our day on this street waiting for the bus. Then, a beat up car comes trudging along the road, it is the first car to even slow down. A nice Italian man asks us where we are going, we tell him Positano and he exclaims “I own an art gallery there! Jump in!”. We get in and make small talk with the man, he is interested in what we are doing and where we are from. Surprisingly enough, when we tell him we are from Santa Fe, NM he knows where that is. In fact he used to own an art gallery there. Turns out the man was an old friend of my father. He took us to his gallery, showed us around the town, and we went on our merry way. This foreign place so far away from home, suddenly was no longer so far away.
Finding the intersections in life can be fun, interesting, and strange as sometimes we find connections that we were not aware existed. Rebecca Kidder describes these strange feelings well in her post On the Corner of Minnesota and Oregon: Intersections. Intersections make us reevaluate the world in which we live. The seemingly foreign places can become a close reminder of something very familiar to us. Strangers we meet on the street thousands of miles from home are friends with someone close to us. The world can come together when we open our eyes to the mini intersections in daily life. Intersections make the 7.12 billion people more fathomable. Are we all connected in some way? Or do some of us just get lucky by stumbling upon the familiar in the foreign?