We live in a big world.  Every day billions of people go about their lives – each of us choosing our path from beginning to end.  Sometimes those paths cross, but more often they don’t.  What impact do the choices made by someone on the other side of the world have on us?  Many of us will answer “none” to that question, but there are others who’ll say we are all connected.

The Merovingian was one of the latter.  Hopefully, you’ll remember his character from The Matrix: Reloaded.  He didn’t see the world as a random collection of disconnected events.  He saw the world as intimately connected and lacking coincidence.  He saw a network of choice and cost…or action and reaction.  At one point, he says, “Where some see coincidence, I see consequence.  Where you see chance, I see cost.”  He rejected the view that life just happened to you.  Instead, he viewed the world as a series of actions and choices that led to the results (or costs) of those same actions.  He understood the effects that the choices we make today have on events tomorrow.  We don’t have the luxury of considering our actions in a figurative vacuum.  Every choice we make acts like a pebble in a pond with a rippling impact on our lives and the lives of others.  And just like our choices of today affect our lives tomorrow, so today is shaped by the actions and choices made yesterday.

Imagine Spider Man,  a superhero ingrained in the consciousness of so many of us since we were children.  One of the tools he uses in his campaign against crime is his spiderweb.  He uses it for travel, swinging from building to building like an urban Tarzan.  He uses it for safety, shielding himself and innocents from the bad guy’s attacks.  He uses it for restraint, preventing the escape and securing the capture of his enemies.

But instead of looking at the function of this particular tool lets look at its form.  We know what a spiderweb looks like.  Radiating strands of silk spiraling out from a central hub.  Individually, a strand of silk doesn’t serve as much purpose as when it is skillfully inter-connected with many other strands in a web.  Imagine any one choice or action we make is the hub and radiating out from it, like the silken strands of a spiderweb, are the ramifications and repercussions of the choice.

Seeing our lives through that imagery would reveal to us a life intricately woven.  Webs of connection spun from our actions intersecting and integrating with webs from others’ actions.

People that possess the strength of connectedness don’t see the world like a grid of polka dots with every life neatly compartmentalized in its own private space.  More accurately, they see the world with all those dots connected by lines going every which way.  The result of these connections would look very much like a spiderweb.

We live in a big world, but it isn’t so big that our actions can’t affect the lives of everyone else here, both today and in the future.