Distance

There are no distance in the world nowdays. If I recall, like 10 years back I need aproximately 4 hours to reach Jakarta from my hometown Bandung. Now, its only take less than half of previous time. Who knows, in the next few years ahead the time needed will be lessen than that.

I always see "distance" as a word, merely reflecting inabilty to coupe with difference in time and places. If you look into a dictionary, a word distance also related with word "far" and "near". Yet those two words are realy subjective to measure. I remember when I was doing a field reasearch on a remote area, I was searching the village leader. One villager said that the leader was in his house, which located on the next valley. He said,"His house is really near. It's only crossed that one hill and one valley to that direction". He pointed into a direction to the jungle. Me and a friend look each other, and reluctant to go to that direction. Crossing a jungle would be take too much time so it was not really a good idea. The villager was confincing us by his words,"There's a dirt road going directly to his house and it only take 2 hours aproximately going there". We're bought by his words and take his advice. But you know what? the place he was said "near" was really very very far away and it took almost 5 hours to go there. Dang! from that moment when I asked direction to a local people, I always double the amount of what they say.

See? The word "distance" is only a perspective which only exist in our mind. It is up to us, humans, how we see things connected. But the problems is.... We, human, almost never see things in a same way, even a twin. We communicate to each other to shorten the "distance", so we can understand each other and have mutual understanding, so there will be no distance between the two. Nevertheless, even when we talk to each other, we always have boundaries, walls and barriers which sometimes can be irritating. Well, to tell you the truth, it is good to have those limits, normal people will have those limits such as like one person rights, But there are limits which can be crossed and cannot be crossed at any cost.

We have to be able to recognize such limits and negotiating those, so the communication could take place and the people involved are able to understand each other. Isn't that what we all wanted? Understanding one another and create a peace world? Well this is for people who're willing to understand each other, but for other who do not know how to understand, or to who're not willing to do so or not care at all, the warld "distance" will be scretched away and used as a gap to show the difference which is likely, it's not really that different at all.