So last year this kid from West was apparently dating a girl down the street from us and we’d see him walking past a few times a week.
This was notable because our house is just east of East. The East-West rivalry is kind of a big deal around here. Not violently so, but enough that it was pretty gutsy for this kid to be strolling around East territory all the time wearing T-shirts and jerseys that said “West” or “Whippets” on them. That’s a rare sight on our block. Usually the only time you see the word “West” on a T-shirt around here is on the day of any big game between the schools, when all the kids waiting for the bus are wearing shirts that say “Beat West.”
Again, this rivalry isn’t marked by any real animosity or hostility. That kid from West and the girl from East weren’t star-crossed lovers in some tragic Romeo and Juliet scenario. But still, in this neighborhood, those West jerseys marked him as an outsider. It identified him as one of Them and not one of Us.
We wouldn’t have to go very far at all for that shirt to take on an entirely different meaning. If we were down the Shore, walking the boardwalk in, say, Ocean City, and we saw somebody in a West jersey, that would be enough of a connection for us to stop and say Hi.
“Downingtown!”
“Hey! You guys from West too?”
“East.”
“Close enough! Have a good one!”
“You too!”
All those cheerful exclamation points are because it would be close enough. Two hours away from here the East-West divide would seem more like an East-West kinship — just two sides of the same town, after all.
Go a little bit farther away and that kinship would seem even closer. If I were in a bar in California and saw somebody in a West jersey, I’d buy that guy a drink. I’m not usually a buy-drinks-for-strangers extrovert, but that guy wouldn’t seem like a stranger. He’s from West. We’re from East. We’re practically family.
All the way out there in California, somebody from Ocean City would seem as close to us as that kid from West would have seemed on the boardwalk. “You’re from Jersey? We’re from Pennsylvania. We’re neighbors!”
Go a little farther, cross an ocean, and now someone from out there in California will seem as close a kin as someone from the opposing bleachers at the East-West game.
“Where you from?”
“Los Angeles!” the guy from Bakersfield says, because at this distance, that’s close enough. “You?”
“Philly!”
“Cool!”
Again, the exclamation-pointed excitement there is genuine. We’re from the same country! We’re neighbors, we’re kin, we’re connected. We can’t see that from here, but from over there — from, say, some airport in Beijing — we’d have the perspective to view that connectedness and kinship as an indisputable and wonderful fact. We’re not strangers — we share the same continent.
We don’t yet know if any of the thousands of exoplanets we’ve discovered in recent years might be habitable for us humans, or for any other form of life. But imagine, as I hope is true, that some are. Now imagine, somehow, that you have been transported to one of those planets, in another solar system unfathomably far from our own.
Not just you, but you and, say, a taxi-driver from that Beijing airport.
They are from China. You are from America. You do not share a nationality or a language. But none of that would matter. You are both humans from earth and the sight of one another, in such a distant place, would be enough to make you both weep for joy.
Strangers? You’re the opposite of strangers. You’re us, both of you, together. Neighbors. Teammates. Comrades. Family.
None of that is any less true here and now than it would be there and then. It only seems less true due to a lack of perspective. It’s harder to see because our eyes are too close to the page.
We are finite creatures whose perception — both figurative and literal — is simply not big enough to take in the bigness of our little world, let alone the universe.
We’re not good at stepping back to see the bigger picture partly because there’s nowhere else we’re capable of stepping back to. But we’ve sometimes caught a glimpse. Like in the photo above, which was taken by Voyager 1 from 3.7 billion miles away and sent back here on Valentine’s Day, 1990. This is the photograph Carl Sagan wrote about as the Pale Blue Dot:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Zoom out. Zoom back in. Here we are, all of us, neighbors. Close enough.
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