Socks and Civility Theorem - Funny seeing you here...

Have you ever noticed, anecdotally, that when you do a load of laundry, pull it out of the dryer and put it in the laundry basket for placement in your drawers, certain elements are often, if not usually, contingent if not close to each other.  Matching socks will be as close as brothers, similar underwear will be entwined like young lovers and t-shirts will be hiding together in the corner.  This seems to be more than coincidental so from my pseudo-scientific observations I postulate that: similar, identical or like bodies of laundry, subject to the same forces of fluid, forced air, friction, spin and rotation turbulence as well as electrostatic attraction centripetal and centrifugal force and Coriolis motion, will wind up in the same general area? (Pardon the exhaustive lists of variables but they all matter.)

Then I noticed that people of the same ilk or persuasion will wind up in the same place, more often than not or more often than the randomness of the universe should dictate, and say “funny meeting you here”. How many times have you run into a friend or compatriot at a store, isle, restaurant, trail head, lift, run, chute or cornice? 

There is primarily a similarity to the supply of people concerning; age, lifestyle, health, time, economy, experience, decision matrix and desires.  There is also a similarity of the attraction that brings us together; stores, products, prices, a sale, passes, powder, snow, sun, shade, season, schedule, weather, climate, heat, mud, moguls, crud, corn, corduroy, angle, aspect, fall line, food source, bathroom, water or beer.  This is not an accident or pure coincident either.  If we are similar humans subject to similar forces and attractions, we will wind up close to the same place.

So here we are living in Park City, for the last five or fifty years, similar, active, athletic skiing-biking people with a recreational bent in search of that ‘quality of life’ thing, keeping score by the number of days spent out and about, not the number of dollars in our pockets and bank accounts.  We have not been randomly lumped in this place but have been drawn here by who we are and what we want and attracted by what this place has to offer

So it is not a coincidence that we are all kindred spirits in our selected nirvana.  We are not forced to be here by family ties, job necessity or spousal demands for hometown martial bliss.  As Stegnar might have said, it is the geography of choice.  We mostly choose to be here.  So as distinct as we are, as different as socks and shirts, we share a commonality of choice and a convergence of coincidence.  We are therefore related, a tribe, a family, tied by our sense of place, this place.  That is why we say ‘hey’ to people we don’t recognize and lend a helping hand to people we don’t know. We are all connected by fate and physics.

That’s what makes this hometown special where we can forget our differences and coalesce our compatibility for the basic things we want; an inclusive, simple, small town, a recreational, family friendly resort with good schools and transportation with a sustainable ski industry, resilient support economy that is attractive and approachable to locals and visitors alike.  Give or take.  The only difference is how do we get there.  Let’s celebrate with civility our similarities in this time of fractured polarities and schisms.  We have more in common than you think.  Like Forest Gump and Jenny, peas and carrots, socks and shirts, we should stick together.

 Inspired by Richard Feynman