MARVIS H NEPTUNE

“They say it is a small world.

People say that.

They happen upon someone they have not seen in many, many years, and they say, “small world.” They find out a stranger in front of them actually came from the same hometown and they say “small world.” They run into their next-door neighbor on the streets of a remote village, hundreds of miles away, and they say “small world.”

Small world. People say that.

But people are wrong. The world is not small.

The surface area of the world is one-hundred and ninety-seven million square miles. The tallest mountain on earth is more than twenty-nine thousand feet high, and the deepest trench in the ocean is further below sea level than that mountain is above sea level. Thirty-six THOUSAND feet below the ocean’s surface.

The circumference of the earth, the distance all the way around the planet in a straight line, is roughly twenty-five thousand miles. If you could walk two-and-one-half miles every hour, and never stop to rest, and never stop to eat, and never stop to sleep, then it would still take you ten thousand hours, more than four hundred days to circle the world and that is only if you could swim as fast as you walk.

It is not, at all, a small world.

It’s huge.

When people say “it’s a small world,” that is not really what they mean. They mean that it is a curious world. They mean that life delivers some of the strangest occurrences.  Some of the most remarkable and remarkably perfect coincidences. They mean that, whether dictated by destiny or luck, strange things can happen. Events can occur that are wonderfully fortunate. They mean that people can find each other without ever looking.

That is the “small world” people are talking about—the world where people find each other without ever looking.