An American friend goes to Abu Dhabi for a year and runs into someone who knows her dear friend back in the States. I am watching The Voice on television and realize there are two people in my Facebook feed who have friends in the show’s national competition. I go see an off-Broadway play about poet Emily Dickinson and it becomes clear I have some meaningful things in common with her.
It’s a small world, as the song goes.
And then I watch Homeland and the world seems so vast. Many of my fellow Americans are tangled in covert operations around the globe and that is making it possible for me to express my annoyance because the coffee served with my Sunday brunch is lukewarm. That humbles me and does wonders for my perspective.
So does interviewing a photographer who engages in travel volunteerism, from Nepal to Guatemala to Peru. I peruse her photograph portfolio and while a sweeping landscape might make me see the expansiveness of the world, another snapshot of a smiling child brings me right back to how small we are in terms of universal pleasures.
The small world cliché continues to hold water because connection is everywhere if we pause long enough to notice it. I live riveted to noticing it, ideally every day.
It’s actually what I notice that shapes my life, right? If I see, above all, the downside of most things, I am living riveted to a negative way of being. It can make my every day existence feel heavy, weighed down by perceived potential ills. If, by contrast, I can find the brightness in most things, I am inviting more lightness into my daily sphere and it buoys me and those around me.
The Voice provides a window on this. The show gives singers an opportunity to be coached by the crème de la crème in the music industry. Sometimes I cringe when I watch an earnest vocalist suffer rejection after seeing them take such an enormous risk, going all out before millions on a major network. But then I see those whose dreams are fueling them and watch the coaches shepherd them in breakthrough performances, their gratitude at being polished and encouraged bubbling to the surface in a show of emotion and I opt to make it all about that for me. The trying. The openness to getting better. The discipline. The ambition.
When I utter “it’s a small world” I want it to be because something wondrous is happening. Oh my gosh, you went for it, too? Isn’t it great to do every possible thing to make a dream a reality? Heady, I’ll tell you.
Live riveted to living, whatever that means to you.
Maybe that’s an Airstream parked next to a lake or in a spot overlooking the mountains or in a place that’s always among lots of kindred spirits. Perhaps it’s the cup of tea sipped while sitting on a cozy porch or balcony to wind down a full day. It could be just deviating from the interstate commute on occasion to take the scenic, greener route. Or maybe it’s a drastic move that upends your thinking and way of being.
But then, as the song tells us:
There is just one moon
and one golden sun
and a smile means friendship to everyone
though the mountains divide
and the oceans are wide
it’s a small world after all
What a kick that is.
By Nancy Colasurdo
