Transience and a Shrinking World

Why is it that as as soon as you get "settled" into a new place, either you or your friends move to a new locale and the whole adjusting process starts again? While it is difficult to constantly be saying goodbye, the negative is balanced somewhat by the happy thought that the world shrinks just a little more as the number of places where you have friends grows.

I moved to Taiwan in the winter of 2001. The first person I met was a fellow Canadian waiting for the airport bus into Taipei. We sat together on the airport bus and I discovered she had just transfered to Taipei and was working in the field I was coming here to explore. Who'd have thought 6 months later, I would be working at the same company? Funnier still is that a month into the job, she received a letter from a friend she met on one of her many travels. This friend said that her neighbor's daughter was also working in Taipei and that the neighbor said her daughter was the most responsible, hard-working, blah blah blah girl you'd ever want to meet! How embarrassing it is that it turned out to be MY MOTHER! It's truly already a small world!

Now that friend is living in Vancouver. Ironically enough, I moved here from Vanouver, but almost none of my University friends remain there anymore and most of the people I know that live in "Vancouver proper" are all people I met in Taiwan! My former Vancouver friends/family are now in LA, London, Toronto, Barbados, etc.

This makes it hard to just call up one of my old (longer-term) friends and meet up for coffee... but it makes planning vacations more interesting. Since one (or more) party will have to travel anyway, we can pick some exotic destination neither has as yet visited. I think it was the Dalai Lama that said that one should try to visit a place one has never been to occasionally... I probably it in one of those annoying PowerPoint chain-mail slide shows that people keep circulating. Hmmm...