The fallout from the plane crash in Resolute Bay last week underlined to me how closely we’re all connected. Something that’s just magnified by our ever-proliferating channels of communication, media, and the ease with which we travel.
If you look at Resolute Bay on the map, you’ll see that the town of 200+ is almost as high north as permanent human habitation gets in Canada’s Arctic. But news of an event in even a place as remote as that, rippled out within hours. It triggered waves of sympathy and sparked discussion over Facebook and email the next day from those of us who, a year ago, had traveled with the little girls caught in the crash. A group of people now long scattered over several continents mourned for them and were able to coordinate a means to send our condolences to their family in Resolute.
Just having seen the girls’ spirit firsthand during that trip made me appreciate more fully the loss to not only the family and the small community, but also how it was a loss for us all. They made the world just that much better by being there.
I’m becoming a big believer that we are all connected. Sometimes this feels apparent when we trace a relationship in the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” sense or have coincidental encounters. I bumped into a German correspondent from that same Arctic boat trip, here on North Beach a couple of months ago. And when I visited my current guest, Jessica, in New York earlier this year, she introduced me to a friend there whose close friend in Salt Lake City happened to be the photographer I collaborated with on my very first magazine article. He and I were both living in different regions of rural Japan at the time. That’s a connection derived through four people, in three countries, over almost two decades.
The fact that everyone has these kinds of stories just supports this idea of connection. Sometimes, the connections over vast and unlikely places have an obvious, direct personal impact. The reason that I’m doing my video posts now is because of a manager at radX, whom I met while doing a newspaper story in Northern Labrador. There are more people who stand on top of Everest each year than visit that park. And from that chance meeting my time here now, on the opposite coast, has a far different feel than if I had not gone on that assignment, cutting short my reconnaissance trip on Haida Gwaii last summer, and met that particular person. But think of how much must be going on without us even being aware of it.
It follows that what happens to any one of us could affect us all in ways that may not be anticipated or knowable. A relative of the concept behind how the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Berlin may set off a tornado in Texas. Our ability to sail through a largely ice-free Northwest Passage last year, was thanks to global warming, an amalgamation of millions of actions taken in far-flung parts of the globe.
Part of people’s ‘cabin in the woods’ fantasies may stem from a desire to go remote, disconnect from society, become completely self-sufficient etc. And these days to really disconnect ourselves takes some effort, because planes have shrunk distances and an internet connection or phone signal means the ability to contact practically anyone else in the world who has the same. And even if one were to remove oneself through sheer physical distance and lack of communication infrastructure, I’d argue that they’re still part of the same whole, with everyone and everything else on the planet.
This idea is as old as Buddhism but I like how Charlie Kaufman puts it in his fine film, Adaptation. As a character in Donald Kaufman’s script says: “We’re all one thing, Lieutenant. That’s what I’ve come to realize. Like cells in a body. ‘Cept we can’t see the body. The way fish can’t see the ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell.” Perhaps as silly as a heart cell trying to get away from the other heart and lung cells and being permanently unreachable by phone or email (or Twitter or Facebook. Okay, maybe that part isn’t so silly).