An invisible web of a million connections.

“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

— Paulo Coehlo, The Alchemist

During my first stay in London nearly three years ago, I kept track of both my inner and outer journeys in something called the Wanderlust Travel Journal.

It was a graduation gift to me by two girls I lived with senior year, and what I loved even more than its title were the many photographs included within the book–whole pages of telephones from around the world, passport stamps, various street signs, or simply blurred images of subways speeding past in metro stations. As Troy Litten, the journal’s creator, writes:

Travel encompasses more than arriving in a new place — it’s about the view through an airplane window, the colors of the phone booths, the conversations with strangers, and the unique mementos collected along the way.

I had the journal out last night in search of a particular entry, one I wrote after a conversation with my friend Kim–one of those epic discussions about life and what our time in London would come to mean for us after we left. Somehow, I found the entry, and then I started looking at the page of photographs just opposite from it.

It was a grid of eighteen images all about train travel–waiting lounges, terminals, a few trains themselves, and in the center, a departure board written half in English, half in Indian. The name of the city–Udaipur–jumped out at me. For the briefest of seconds I thought, why does that name sound so familiar? And then it hit me: Oh, right! In four months’ time, I’ll be living there.

While the story of how I came to choose Udaipur as my base for a couple of months following the Rickshaw Run is pretty cool as well, I couldn’t believe what I’d just discovered. Although the picture of the Udaipur departure board alone was thrilling, what was even cooler was the photo’s placement in the scheme of the journal–the fact that just opposite from it, I had written about my struggle to figure out where to go next. At the bottom of the page I’d written the same question I asked Kim that night:

How do I return to the States after this experience?

By which I meant, how does one ever return home after something like a life-changing experience takes place somewhere decidedly not our home? Can we bring that change with us? Can we carry that person with us, the person we’d become somewhere else? I had to stop last night and think about what those two pages represented. On the left side, someone with a total lack of direction, and on the right side, someone with a crazy new direction her 22-year-old self would never have believed was possible.

Seeing two threads of my life suddenly entwined was unexpected, and reminded me of the on-going debate about whether it’s a big or a small world. “I like the idea that the world is big,” a friend of mine once said, “I don’t ever want to feel like it’s small.” And yet other friends have talked about how small the world has become for them, how much they love being able to pick their life up at a moment’s notice and move elsewhere.

For me, it isn’t so much a matter of size as it is connection. I draw comfort from the fact that it isn’t a random world, but one that we move through on an invisible web of a million connections.

A world in which we record our thoughts, without even realizing what we’re writing them down next to.