Sometimes moments of connection come when one is simply in the right place at the right time, no matter how transient such a connection may be. As it happens, this morning I was at the front of the line of people waiting to get on a plane going to Lisbon, and since the plane was at a gate, we had the chance to see the people get of the plane rather than them deplaning onto the tarmac and coming into the airport via bus as happened to me yesterday afternoon when I arrived in a small jet. And so it was that towards the end of the line of people there came a woman in a wheelchair who happened to be my mother. I waved at her, recognizing her early on, and she waved back, at first politely, but then a beaming smile shone on her face when she realized that it was me waving at her from the other side of the glass partition between us. And so it was that I got on the plane that she arrived on, and I got to Lisbon, where I will be waiting to catch up with her and hear her story of missed plane connections and delays, as we wait for the flight that will (God willing) take us on to Malaga this evening.

One of the games I enjoy playing the most on my computer is called Fly Corp. It is a simple game, even rudimentary, where dots on a map of the world appear labeled as the airport for a given town or city, your job is to connect them with the existing routes, making sure to have enough space in the airports for people to wait for connections and enough lines connecting the cities together that the passengers are able to make it their way between the city they depart from and where they are going. During gameplay the player makes money based on successful trips and various events happen that increase or decrease travelers, increase the cost of upgrading routes and/or planes, or that even shut down an airport or an entire country’s worth of airports in a week. Adding routes and planes and increasing the size of planes and airports all costs money, and sometimes the game’s scenarios have a time limit where one must survive for a given time or add a particular country within a certain time. The game itself consits of dots for airports and lines for routes, and I would like to expand upon that metaphor.

When we think of the dots of connection, a related set of concerns is revealed. A dot may be a place where connections take place, like a bus or train station or airport, or a cafe or a restaurant, or a church, or a virtual place like a website or social media program where people communicate with each other. For any such place, real or virtual, a dot will do. A dot may also be a specific interaction with someone where there is a moment of realization or recognition that turns a mere interaction into a connection. A dot may even serve for the person that one is connected to as a relative, a friend, an enemy, a co-worker, or some other form of connection. We may think of connections as rich connections or poor connections, bad connections or good connections, but they are people who we know that bring us into contact with the wider world around us and its concerns.

When we look at lines, the reality is much the same. A line may be a transportation route that allows goods and people to move from one place to another. It may be a cable or wireless or satellite link that allows us to communicate with and send and receive information with others. It may be a specific sort of relationship that ties one person or thing to another through heredity, action, or affiliation. Together, though, the lines and dots demonstrate two aspects of connections. Connections may either be the things (thought of broadly) as being connected or the ways in which those things are connected to each other. We cannot do with either the points or the lines, because it is only the two of them together that describe the reality of what it means to be connected. Lines may connect people from far away, as when it connects someone with their distant ancestors, or when it connects two people who are friends or co-workers who have never been within ten thousand miles of each other but have nonetheless communicated with each other, or two dots may be physically close to each other but not be connected at all for one reason or another because of studied avoidance or a lack of opportunity for connections to be made.

It is well and natural that one should think of connections while one is traveling. People connect with other people through or despite their travels. People go from one place to another, connecting incidents and histories and experiences along the way, drawing insight, we would hope, from the circumstances they undergo and the thoughts they muse upon while in significant places. Travel connects us with others engaged in the same task, or those who enable that task to take place, as well as others who have made the same kinds of trips that we have and with whom we may compare our observations and share our experiences. And so it is that the lines and dots which may look so ordinary and even plain when seen as part of a schema or map come alive and become the record of all that connects us with each other, all that means anything in this world that seems both strangely isolated and overcrowded at the same time.