Some of my earliest blog entries dealt with some thoughts of mine about friends – closeness of friendship and the fact that there are just a few people in anyone’s life who become intricately entwined in that life. As my ideas are developing in that area (and in all other areas of course) it now strikes me that fundamental to the friendships are connections – and this also sits well with my later amendment that whilst I started out talking about friends the ‘closeness’ attribute also applied to enemies!
Some of these ideas have been helped by watching the TV series Touch – fiction that deals with the interconnected nature of our world. Yes – it is fiction. Yes – it did at times seemingly ‘create’ the connection for the sake of narrative coherence. Yes – at times the connections seemed merely to be there for the sake of it. Despite all of that, the series – which didn’t exactly meet with acclaim (there is to be no further series) – did highlight how we often encounter connections that have unexpected consequences.
One of the ‘highlights’ of the programme for me is the voice over that occurs at the beginning and end of each episode and which highlights the ‘deeper’ thinking behind the whole concept. An example, and part of the driving force behind this post, was the very first one in the opening episode which stated (amongst other things):
Now – the precise details of the story – ankle or little finger, for instance – vary depending on the source – however, the important bit of the tale is that there IS a connection.
Those people we meet once and never see again will be connected in a very weak way – others will become strong connections – and this matches my ‘layers’ of friendship – or rather ‘layers’ of relationships, since someone that we continually “lock horns” with will become equally tightly coupled – like, for example, Holmes and Moriarty. The connection becomes strong and increasingly unbreakable – it may bend and twist, but it rarely breaks completely.
Now – that, as I say, is not too far away from what I previously wrote. It can be seen as some form of confirmation. Additionally, there are other ‘explanations’ of the ‘red thread’ around – two that particularly come to mind for me are Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance” and Hofstadter’s “strange loops”.
I may well come back to that in a future post – for now, what about the ‘other’ side of this coin – the fact that its not just that we make stronger connections with those that are close but also that we become close to those with whom we have a connection.
This – I guess – is related to determinism, free will – and so on. Are there people/things in the world that we are already tied to by this red thread and just don’t know it yet? For me, my ‘imagination’ is drawn towards the Sheldrake-like view that we are actually attached to everyone/everything else. In some cases the initial bonds are stronger than others – for all sorts of reasons including geography, ancestry and social position. It is clear, to me at least, that there are some people in the world that I am more likely to meet than others; there are some people I am more likely to bond with than others; there are, of course, also some I am more likely to dislike than others; and so on.
So the network of “red threads” sometimes consists of single strands and other times thick ropes. There comes a point where the connection is so short and thick that it becomes almost impossible to sever. It may unravel a bit, but only sustained attack can reduce it to close to nothing. The threads can be made stronger – or perhaps its just the case that we realise the strength that was always there.
There are people who have come into my life – and stayed – who were not, perhaps, ‘predictable’. By that I mean that there was an element of – I guess – serendipity about how the connections were made. Was that because we were bound together by a stronger thread to start with? Why – out of a class of thirty or so at school did I choose the four or five people whom I became particular friends with? Why – out of all the girls in the first orchestra I played in did two or three particularly “catch my eye”? 😳 And so on…..
Of course, there were other situations – when just two of us were doing the same degree, of course we ‘connected’. When a few people from my company all attended an international event – of course we ‘connected’. That, though, does not necessarily destroy the threads idea, because it is entirely possible that the reason we attended was to enable the already strong threads that connected us to be made clear.
There is a certain amount of “chicken and egg” about all of this – do we connect because of the threads or are the threads there because we connect? In my view it is a mix of both. We will, naturally, connect with people with similar interests, or who live/work close by, or who attend the same church/gym. However, the fact that we have a predisposition to meet is also determined by the threads. There are plenty of people with similar interests, who live/work close by and who attend the same church/gym that we would not manage to connect with in the same way!