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shaunhelman0

Location, location, location


Knowing where your important people are is really cool!


On a Thursday, a few weeks ago, I went to a gig. I think it was the first gig I had attended since before the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit played the Hammersmith Apollo, and it was excellent.


In the afternoon before the gig I spent some time waiting for Kim, my wife, to drive up from our home in Wokingham. I had been away during the week, and had come back to London to meet our friend Jill, who was coming with us to the gig.


Jill and I were eating dinner, aware that Kim (who had been working all day at home) was on the way. I noted to Jill that Kim was sharing her live location on WhatsApp so we would know when she was nearly there. We were planning to meet Kim at the car to drop my luggage and bike. "She's just left home", I said.


As we spoke over dinner, the conversation turned to Beata’s trip. Jill had not been fully aware of the details. She knew that Beata had taken a sabbatical to sail around the world, but grew more interested as I described the route (including the three-week trip across the Atlantic to just get to the start line). “Look…” I said, “you can see where Beata is approximately - here just off the coast of Morocco”, as I showed Jill the location tracker for Misty, the boat that will be Beata's home for the next year and a half.


Kim was travelling about 40 miles up the M4, taking about an hour, with WhatsApp updating her location every few seconds. Beata was on the prelude of a trip travelling 26,000 miles around the world, taking about 12,000 hours, with Misty checking in to her location tracker every six hours or so.


How great it is to be able to connect with people in this way. Despite the vastly different contexts, it was this single variable - location - that afforded me the same connection with the people on their respective journeys. Knowing where they were was important, albeit for different reasons, and over vastly different timelines.


A few days later, I was talking with Kim about it. I said how pleased I was that technology enables this connection. She said that she has all the places where our friends and family live stored in her weather app, as she likes to check in on conditions where they are. She finds it comforting.


"Location, location, location" is not just about house prices. It is about a fundamental connection between us, and about us knowing, for one reason or another, where we all are, and where we are all going.


Shaun


Mid-November, 2022


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