I recently rewatched the movie 6 Degrees of Separation which is an adaptation of a play by the same name. The name of the movie might sound like that party game 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon but it's really an established hypothesis on human interactions and relationships. It asserts that through a line of 6 people, you can somehow connect yourself to every single other human being on the planet.

A line from the movie:
 I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it A) extremely comforting that we're so close, and B) like Chinese Water Torture that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.


It's a very thrilling idea and it is certainly fun to think about. That despite every other imaginable difference that can erupt between two people, we are still linked through the people we know. At first ponder it does make the world seem almost smaller, that through only a handful of people I might know a Tibetan monk or a Chilean mountaineer. And then after a little more pondering it strikes that I'll never meet those people and it is again nothing more than a party game, no more serious than 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon. That only 5 people separate me and a Gondolier in Venice ultimately amounts to nothing. It makes the world seem more impossible, it makes it seem that the dozens of people I know in my pocket of existence are just a small fraction of all the possible relationships I might have made in the world. It is not a bad thought, but it isn't a good one either.

In the play/movie they use a double sided Kandinsky painting. From my google searches the painting never existed, but one side was definitely something he did. In the movie they would spin it around and call one side chaos and one side order. As they describe it in the movie : "One [side] wild and vivid, the other sombre and geometric." It was probably the most returned to prop in the movie almost to the point of being shoved down my throat, but I think it had its merits. A few times it was spun around from side to side with the same exact quote: "Chaos. Control. Chaos. Control. You like? You Like?"

And as it spins around it seems that's the image the director wants us to have. That the world doesn't belong to one or the other, but is constantly spinning between the two, between chaos and order. And doesn't that feel like a fitting image for this world of ours? This world that makes sense to some degree, but upon closer inspection is just a tumultuous breeding ground for atomic nonsense? Take into consideration that image and look at the web of humanity, look at your own relationships. From afar it looks like a hectic ant hive, but look closer at the meaning and the interactions on the individual level and it makes some sort of sense. So where do you stand right now? Are you in the midst of chaos? Order? Or something else entirely?