Have you ever really thought about why people make connections with others? It is both natural and mysterious – why connect with Person A, but not with person B? Certainly some of this is down to ‘circumstances’ – we will make connections (good or bad) with people that we share a close space with – at work, at school, in church, or wherever. There is, however, more to it than that.
Lets use just one example – I have over the last couple of years become a moderately active user of LinkedIn. I have ‘collected’ a number of contacts there. Initially, I concentrated on building a group of people that I have interacted with – from all round the globe – in my professional life and that gave me a core network.
For the purposes of this post, however, I want to concentrate on what happened after that. I am now adding to my contacts people that I have ‘met’ only on LinkedIn – they have shared the same discussions, sometimes without me realising it, and that has resulted in a connection. I haven’t kept careful records, but I suspect that there is a ratio of about 60:40 in favour of the other person initiating the connection.
Now – the question is – “why those people” and not all the others who inhabit the same spaces in the virtual world of LinkedIn. What causes me to be drawn to some people – definitely a sense of shared interests and shared beliefs – although often there is an initial spark of connectivity that happens before I know enough about them to be aware of the closeness of our respective ‘worldviews’.
Is there some link between like-minded people that draws them to each other – a sort of field similar to a magnet – an “attractor”? In the days before the world wide web there is no doubt that I would never have come into contact with some of these people. But then, that happens in the ‘real’ world as well – a change in circumstances – new job, going to university, emigrating to a new country – leads to encounters with people that would not have happened otherwise. What caused what?
I suppose that is beginning to touch on fate or destiny. I have no idea what each of these individual connections will lead to. I have no idea if – when I look back in a few years time I will experience an “aha” moment and realise exactly what things were leading. More likely I will fail to see the promptings and proddings that direct my life on its future course and fail to recognise the influence that one (or more) of these connections had.
In previous posts I have written about the impossibility of comprehending the vast number of influences that have contributed to each of us arriving at the precise place we are in our lives. Everyone we have encountered, however briefly, has left a mark – an impression – on our lives (and vice versa). Whether it is the person chosen to be your life partner, or someone you once looked at briefly on a bus – they each made a contribution to who you are NOW.
The vast majority of interactions will make almost no difference to the participants in that interaction – but then again – who knows what second, third, …n-th-order effects will result from even those small connections. So, returning to LinkedIn – who knows just how many people read each post in the discussions – who knows how they will affect the thinking of the person reading them.
Obviously LinkedIn groups lend themselves to meeting people with similar interests – although it isn’t too long before you discover that there can be significant ‘differences of opinion’!! So, given that I joined a group that has over 350000 members, why do I find myself ‘connecting’ with the half dozen or so that I have? Sure, in some cases their posts made it clear that they were sufficiently like-minded, but nothing can quite prepare you for the way in which you often ‘connect’ in unsuspected ways – I have had a number of such occurrences recently.
I don’t have an answer to this (sorry if you were expecting one!) but it is yet another thing that leads me to an even stronger belief that we really do not know how the world works…… From my library links you will see that I have been reading Rupert Sheldrake – his idea of morphic fields may be part of the answer – but I certainly don’t know yet. I am 100% convinced that there ways in which we are all connected that are not understood – some of those connections are very strong, although most are weak.