A Holiday Greeting for You from You

My mom is our family poet and a writer who has been composing little humorous personalized sonnets for almost every birthday, wedding, anniversary or other significant events in our family and her work clusters.  Last weekend she worked on a non-rhymed New Year greeting, and the fact that the year 2014 is a year of the Horse in Chinese calendar gave her a lot of ideas to write about. Here it is, loosely translated from the Russian;

We already work hard as a workhorse; pull the plow as peasant horse; strive to come to the finish line first , like a racehorse; fear losing our jobs as an old horse; easily bought by sweets like a circus horse;  devoted to our owner (employer , children, friends ) as domestic horse.
Therefore we are ready to welcome the 2014 NEW YEAR!
And let every home and every heart find a place for a small horseshoe, which will bring us a little luck and much happiness!
Be healthy, as a young horse, racing all year long.
and so long....

She sent the greeting by email to me and seven of her closest friends from Israel and Russia on December 30th. A day later she received an email with her own greeting from one of my dad's friends who resides in Florida. Interestingly the text was edited to exclude parts about life in Israel that were not so applicable to the Florida retirees. What are the chances for an email to go around the globe (at least once) and among millions of potential recipients, and come back to the original writer!

Actually, this is not so rare.  Something similar may have likely happened to you.
While our world is inconceivably large, our circle of friends is rather small and typically based around age, interests, education, socio-economic status. And some of our friends' friends are likely to know each other. Moreover, there are those of us who serve as "network hubs", social butterflies with extremely large circle of friends and acquaintances that goes outside of their age, interests, education and socio-economic status, which allows to connect people from different networks together.

In Hollywood this paradigm is known as 6-degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, stating that any actor could be linked to the well-known Kevin Bacon with up to 6 steps.  Mathematicians are counting their "proximity" to  Paul Erdős in Erdős numbers.  This prolific Hungarian mathematician apparently spent large portion of his life travelling around and writing papers with those who would give him room and board. He published more than any other mathematician in history. LinkedIn has used this chain-of-connections concept to help anyone reach almost everyone for a professional contact.

Going back to our New Year week, let's contemplate our enormous world being tightly connected and inter-dependent, and how anything good we do could spread around bringing so much happiness and ricocheting back to us just when we need it. Happy New 2014, the Year of the Horse.