Even if you’ve never visited a Disney theme park, you probably know the song, It’s a Small World (After All). It’s more than a catchy tune—are you humming it yet?—it’s the truth.
Did You Know…
- Brothers, Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman, wrote It’s A Small World (After All) in 1962 in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
- The song, It’s A Small World (After All), began as a slow ballad. Walt Disney wanted something more cheerful, so they sped up the tempo.
- So delighted with the song, Walt Disney changed the Disneyland ride from “Children of the World,” to “It’s a Small World.”
- According to the youngest son of Robert B. Sherman, the Sherman Brothers’ song, It’s A Small World (After All), is the most-performed and most-translated piece of music of all time.
- In 2022, the Library of Congress selected the Disneyland Boys Choir’s 1964 recording of It’s A Small World (After All) for preservation in the National Recording Registry because it’s “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Distance
Thanks to today’s technology, the world has shrunk. The ease of long-distance travel has changed the way we live. In the distant past, when a family moved “far” away, they rarely, if ever, saw their loved ones in person again. With the coming of trains, this began to change. Add cars and planes, and the ability to visit with friends and family over long distances became common. For me, that meant multi-trips per year between Tennessee and Texas to visit family, frequent visits from friends in New Zealand, and work and vacation trips both in the States and around the globe. Long-distance travel has been an ordinary part of my world. What about yours?
Interaction Changed
Any time people find common ground, their interaction with each other changes. The further the distance between their normal lives, the more pronounced this change is, and often includes suspension of normal wariness about strangers. Like the time I spoke with a co-worker at a remote job site off the coast of Alaska. Not only were we both from Texas, but we had gone to school only forty miles or so apart. With that discovery, our relationship shifted. Suddenly we acted more like schoolmates than strangers who’d just met.
A similar thing happened when I stayed at a B&B in England. I bonded with a mother and daughter duo, also staying at the B&B, because they were from Kentucky, and I was from Tennessee. You’d have thought we were next-door neighbors, rather than people living in neighboring states.
Six Degrees of Separation
Have you heard the theory that all people can be connected by six or fewer social connections or “friend of a friend” statements? It’s an easy concept to accept in our shrinking world.
Years ago, at my first company conference in Anchorage, I met the finance manager of a new contract near Washington, D.C. I learned her grandparents had lived in a tiny town just west of my hometown. But what blew my mind was when she told me she remembered going to visit her aunt and uncle “in the country” when she was a little girl. The “in the country” location happened to be my hometown! (Well, the outskirts of town.) Though her aunt and uncle only lived in the area about a year before he died and his wife moved away, with a little investigation we would probably have found someone that I knew who knew her relatives.
Then there’s the time a woman from a neighboring town visited New Zealand and met one of our New Zealand friends who was a customs agent at the time. He shocked her when he not only recognized the name of her hometown but told her he’d been there. He explained his friendship with our family and learned she knew my parents, too.
Did You Know…
- The concept of six degrees of separation originated long before John Guare’s 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation. The concept began in 1929 with a short story written by Frigyes Karinthy.
A Closer Connection
You never know when and where these unexpected meetings will happen. Or with whom you might connect. Several years ago, Dad went with Mom to a doctor’s appointment. After the nurse called her back, another man in the waiting room approached Dad and began talking. Turned out the man had a relative in our hometown. Hearing that, Dad asked him who, knowing he likely knew whomever it was. You can imagine Dad’s shock to hear his own name as the man’s relative. (The man’s mother was Dad’s first cousin from Louisiana. Someone he hadn’t seen in many years.)
Final Thoughts
Thanks to air travel and bullet trains, people can zip from one part of the world to another in only hours. TVs, smartphones, and computers shrink the world even more. The notion that “what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas no longer applies. Walt Disney was right. It’s a small, small world. So, next time you leave home, take the time to talk to strangers but don’t forget to mind your Ps & Qs. You never know who you might meet . . . and who they might know.