Tuesday, January 03, 2006

The World Is Big

The world split wide in the fall of 1994. I'd spent the entirety of my life to that point in small towns feeling like a fish out of water: I didn't talk like I was from there...I didn't think like I was from there...I was palpably unrooted...and stuck-feeling all at the same time. 

It was early then....the telnet days...when the "web" was very new...before the prevalence of HTML...and the slow, expectant wait for Mosaic to load... It was in those days that, on the advice of one of my students, I telnetted for the first time to StarMUD...a text-only "multi-user dimension" run out of Sweden.

But it wasn't the game that fascinated me (imagine the dinasaur cousin of Everquest)...it was that there, amid the programmed monsters and the kevlar vests and the weaponry, were other users...other people...from around the country and around the world. People I could talk to who didn't have my small-town roots. People with a broader perspective. I logged in one night and called out to no one in particular and everyone in general for company...and a response came back. An unlikely Swedish corsair, several years my junior, answered the call and would change me forever...

In the hours, days, months (years!) that followed, he and I became intense friends...despite a wearying time difference and competing work/school schedules, we talked online every moment we could. We were young...we were kindred spirits...we traded ideas...we told our stories to each other...we wondered about the world and wrote poetry. And for me it was as if the gates of possibility burst forth: the world was so big!

It began there...with that experience...my belief that the confines of my physical location did not dictate the boundaries of my human experience. I embraced the internet for its possibilities...for the connections I could make...for the people I could meet....for the opportunity to learn a person from the inside out...to be learned the same.

I'm embracing it still. At the end of the day, I really don't think it's much different from meeting people in a bar or in a cafe or at work...and the odds of meeting "good ones" with real connection potential are, on the whole, probably not much different...(and the conversations I have online are probably deeper than the average coffee talk -- which, I admit, I prefer).

Not every internet-based introduction has gone well over the years...some have never even made it to "real life"...but in the end, I genuinely believe I am better for having taken the chance on making connections...and I am grateful for those friendships I have formed...for those only just forming now...and for those yet to come!

Life is short...connection is paramount...and the world is so very big.

1 comment:

Cheryl said...

Not to be repetitive, but we are sisters. Honestly, one of our mothers is lying because we are twins.