During the days of the Roman Empire, roads were marked based on the distances between that place and Rome (similar to mile markers on freeways today) and a cliche of the time was that all roads led to Rome. As long as the empire was strong, plunder, food crops, and luxury goods flowed from outlying provinces, nearby farms, and foreign countries to the city of Rome that was at the center of the empire both geographically as well as politically and economically. Mind you, this economy was not necessarily beneficial to the world at large [1], yet it was an economy that had a clear center at Rome that was the center of power and influence and that was vitally important the viability of the society and culture of Rome, at least until other cities (like Constantinople) picked up the slack and Rome slid into a long and painful decline once its power waned and it was no longer the center of its world.
There are a few different ways that networks of communication and transportation can be made. One can have a giant and all-powerful center that everything is connected to. This is a parasitic sort of development, where a powerful core dominates a periphery that is valued simply for what it can give to the middle and not what it offers on its own terms. Alternatively, an area can have its development and communication geared towards export, usually along river or seacoasts (or, alternatively, railroads) that still provide the cheapest transportation for goods from one area to another. This too is a type of parasitic relationship, where elites involved in the production commodities profit at the expense of the rest of society, where cheap labor sources must be exploited to make the export-driven trade work, and where the area as a whole suffers because its income is unstable and based on foreign or imperial markets, increasing a society’s vulnerability to disruptions. A better way of development of communication and transportation network is to be without a core or a center, but where everything is connected with everything else, leading to development where routes connect, and leading to local development that builds up a society from internal resources.
In many ways, people are like this as well. Some people are the center of their worlds, drawing attention from others around. Others are periphery people who devote their attention to others without much being offered in return. And others are friendly to anyone they are around, but are rather flexible in terms of their networks of people. Some people are good at focusing attention on others in conversation, others are only interested in talking about a few subjects, while others have a strong interest in many areas but find that those areas often coalesce into a very narrow core of interests that pop up over and over and over again. People are fascinating to watch, and it is intriguing to learn yourself as well.
When it comes to people, we are sometimes like empires. Sometimes we remain an inscrutable mystery, impossible to decipher because we do not have roads into our innermost thoughts and feelings, but rather trackless wilderness. Some of us, on the other hand, are glaringly obvious because there is little to us that cannot be seen easily by those who are willing to look. Others of us have long and complicated trips that mostly end up at the same place because we have such a strong core to our lives that it brings everything, in nearly every field, to the same suite of concerns. Whatever kind of person we are, or whatever kind of people we meet, let us make the most of it. We only live once, and too short to justify the time we spend in needless and unnecessary drama.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/book-review-terry-jones-barbarians/
Edge Induced Cohesion 