How can we ever get over the allure of thinking we’re so different from everyone else? Especially since, by any hasty analysis, we are. Especially since we tend to only draw the tiniest of circles in which we could be the same.

But a funny thing happened to me while traveling to London earlier this month. The morning I arrived I’d basically been awake for two days already, having started the day driving through rural Idaho and now finding myself in an eclectic London passageway (think Diagon Alley). There was a guy giving samples outside a tea shop. I thought free caffeine seemed ideal. But he began talking to me and I felt further exhausted to be asked such loaded questions as “where are visiting from?”. Very similar to my previous post here, but this time bolstering extra disillusions of worth in my mind now that we were almost 5,000 miles away from my answer. But in abiding with my belief in the truth, I told him. And you’ll never believe his response. He said “have you skied Corbet’s Couloir?”. Not only had this guy heard of Jackson– but he’d been here and saved enough detailed memories to have a 15 minute conversation with me about Jackson (and hells no, neither of us have ever skied the Couloir).

So the universe found a way to burst my tiny circle with the literal first person I met in London. I’m not alone in loving both tiny mountainous Jackson and giant bustling London. Just as I’m likely not alone in loving, or being, many seemingly disparate things in life.

Moment of Gratitude: The world begins as one big circle– we’re the only ones who make it smaller.