How big is your village?
Two babies were born last week. A reason for celebration, for congratulations. The long wait over and the beginning of another lifetime. I heard the news today. Better late than not at all, as the aphorism allows.
The only thing that made these births particular, among all the babies that are born each day, is that both mothers work with me. I’ve been side by side with them for almost the whole nine prepartum months, and I want them to know that I’m happy for them. For reasons that are not clear to me, it is more by chance than anything else that I even found out.
You see, I confuse the workplace with the village of other times. Around me, people go through the same life cycle as anywhere else; birth, romance, sorrow. There is no cone of silence; the news passes all around us. We are left feeling by times that we hear more than we should, if nothing else.
We live in a world where news is omnipresent. And, perhaps, there lies the root of the confusion tree. Because we hear everything, we assume everything. I’m sure that others believed the news had passed to every corner of our building. Yet, the grapevine is fallible. Without being a “noseybody”, I’d like to see that my imposed village improve in the communications section. We don’t need the hateful gossip, but the joyous news could do a better job of getting around.
In mathematics, we were shown the Venn diagram, to explain subsets of a greater set. Let’s redraw the walls of those circles, with something more permeable.
