{"id":250,"date":"2013-06-10T21:26:21","date_gmt":"2013-06-10T21:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=250"},"modified":"2025-06-24T09:10:42","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T09:10:42","slug":"pulling-those-threads-tight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/pulling-those-threads-tight\/","title":{"rendered":"Pulling Those Threads Tight"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the two previous posts,\u00a0The Red Thread<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Making Connections<\/a>,\u00a0 I wrote about the connections we have with other people and how there seems to often be an inexplicably strong connection to some – manifesting itself in the way that our lives constantly intertwine.\u00a0 Typical of this is, of course, family connections – these are to be expected.\u00a0 It is inevitable that we interact with other members of our family – even if that is only at births, marriages and funerals!!<\/p>\n

However, I want to concentrate in this post on those connections that are equally strong and long lasting, but which have far less ‘reason’ to be there.\u00a0 Some of this reiterates what I wrote in the previous posts – some updates the thinking – some is new.<\/p>\n

The original Chinese story of “The Red Thread” has the Gods pulling the thread tighter and drawing people together – do we as individuals contribute to strengthening (and\/or shortening) the connections with particular people?\u00a0 Are we ourselves “the Gods” – or perhaps more ‘acceptable’ are we the mechanism by which the ‘will’ of the Gods is carried out.\u00a0 (Note that here I am using “the Gods” to be in keeping with the Chinese story – this is not to suggest that this couldn’t be equally true if it was “God” rather than “the Gods”)<\/p>\n

Certainly throughout my life I can think of people that I have actively ‘pursued’ in terms of connecting with them.\u00a0 The modern day mechanism is of course “Friending” on Facebook, or “Connecting” on LinkedIn, or some other way of “getting close” within the social networks of the word wide web.\u00a0 There were always “ways and means” to accomplish this – but nowadays it is so much easier and the ‘reach’ of the connections is far less bound by geographical limitation.<\/p>\n

Alongside those that I have been keen to ‘connect’ to, there are also people that I can identify who seem to (for one reason or another) follow me around – and I don’t mean in the sense of stalking here!!\u00a0 Again, in some instances these are reasonably easily explained – but in others you sort of think that ‘fate’, or whatever you want to call it, is most certainly playing a big part.<\/p>\n

The connections can be many and varied – often they are ‘professional’ – by that I mean not just directly work related, but also ‘interest’ related – many of my LinkedIn connections, for instance, fall into that bracket.\u00a0 Sometimes there are people that I see contributing to a thread and I think – they seem to be ‘interesting’.\u00a0 I use the word ‘interesting’ because the precise nature of the ‘link’ that forms can be quite varied – it can be people who clearly have views similar to mine or people who have quite different views that they express in a good and open way.<\/p>\n

Of course, this sort of connecting is precisely what the type of networking that LinkedIn promotes is all about.\u00a0 My interest here is not so much in the connections themselves – more in questions like “why this person and not that person” or “why does this person form a particularly strong connection”.\u00a0 At a superficial level you could say “its obvious” – you just “get on well” with them – however, that begs the person of “how did you start ‘getting on well’ with them rather than with someone else”?<\/p>\n

Sometimes, I admit, the answers are obvious – but sometimes it almost seems as though the “thread” joining me to someone else is indeed being pulled tighter by something\/someone – bit like when we were younger and our ‘best’ friend would attempt to “fix you up” with a date. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

An example – made suitably anonymous to avoid any potential ’embarrassment’.\u00a0 The first thing that ‘connects you with a stranger on LinkedIn is when they post to a thread that you are following.\u00a0 So it was with Gunther.\u00a0 His post, although brief, suggested an open and inquiring mind – more importantly there was just a suggestion in there that here was someone who shared at least part of my worldview.<\/p>\n

LinkedIn (like ‘real life’) concentrates your activities in a number of little ‘worlds’ that are frequented by people who share your interests – I say “little” but some are (numerically) the size of a small town, so it is fair to say that we will each only know a few of the other ‘inhabitants’.\u00a0 So, when a person appears in more than one place that you frequent it immediately links you in a ‘tighter’ way (and, of course, again this is precisely what LinkedIn is trying to do – looking at someone’s profile you see how you are ‘connected’ to them – shared friend; shared interests; etc.<\/p>\n

Gunther, who I initially ‘met’ in one of the areas that I rarely frequent, turned out to have just one shared group – other than where we met and, having seen his picture once, I began to notice that it frequently appeared – commenting in discussions that I had an interest.\u00a0 A number of times I found myself having discussions with Gunther around topics in which we had a shared interest.\u00a0 Then it turned out that we shared interests\/mindsets that were nothing to do with the topics\/groups we belonged in.<\/p>\n

(part of this – it could be argued – was because like attracts like – and I wouldn’t dispute that.\u00a0 However, that does little to distinguish between all those who share similar interests – there are plenty that I have not connected with)<\/p>\n

Outside the professional field, we find the same in the rest of our life – we share friendships with some of our work colleagues but not others – we become friends with some of our class mates at school\/college, but not others – we pursue romantic liaisons with some friends (and some strangers) but not others.\u00a0 Whilst some of the reasons for this can be clear, it is far from a black\/white situation.\u00a0 The romantic liaison, for instance, is a prime example of what might seem like chance.<\/p>\n

When I think of the number of “lucky breaks” that had to happen to result in me first meeting and then marrying my wife it would seem that (logically) there was only a very small chance of that happening.\u00a0 Some of that we each had under our control; some of it could be seen as being manipulated; by far the majority of these chance events were either not something that we could do anything about or we had made decisions a long time in the past that were necessary to “bring us together”.<\/p>\n

This is, perhaps, the most clear example of the threads being pulled tight.<\/p>\n

The final group of people I just want to mention briefly are those who without any effort (seemingly on the part of either myself or them) become part of my life.\u00a0 I’d like to break that into two groups actually – there are some who ‘suddenly appear’ as if from nowhere – like a few who have ‘connected’ with me online – and there are others who I’d like to concentrate on briefly and who fall into the category of “it would be good to know them”!<\/p>\n

Do we – can we – manipulate these interactions simply by ‘wanting’ them to happen?\u00a0 I can think of a number of people who were (in my eyes) unreachable for one reason or another, bear in mind that I was and am a bit ‘shy’ at initiating friendships, but who were in the “group of people I would like to know better”.\u00a0 Again – that could have been for any one (or more) of many reasons.\u00a0 What links these people together is that they unexpectedly came into my “reachability” circle – working together, making music together or whatever.<\/p>\n

Did I manage to pull the threads tighter in those situations?<\/p>\n

Not got answers to these questions – in some cases it would be true to say that I was trying to ‘connect’ with the “unreachables” – what puts them in that category however is that I was unable to do so – until – something else happened that enabled the connection.\u00a0 In other cases, the enabling happened out of the blue – “circumstances” threw us together one way or another.<\/p>\n

This will surely be expanded upon in a future post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the two previous posts,\u00a0The Red Thread\u00a0and\u00a0Making Connections,\u00a0 I wrote about the connections we have with other people and how there seems to often be an inexplicably strong connection to some – manifesting itself in the way that our lives constantly intertwine.\u00a0 Typical of this is, of course, family connections – these are to be … Continue reading “Pulling Those Threads Tight”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[86,103,110,119],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ignorance","tag-friends","tag-philosophical","tag-systems-thinking","tag-worldview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2940,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions\/2940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}