11

Your mobile phone number is 11 digits long.  All I need is those 11 digits to be able to speak to you, hear your voice, see you, and for you to see me.  Not to mention a whole host of other forms of communication that our smart phones now open up to us.

I think about the people in my life and how much we stay in touch.  I think about the impact they have had on my life and I often wonder and sometimes wish that I had met them sooner than I did.  It's incredible to think that 10 years ago my life could have been so different if I had been in touch with the people I am today.  All it would have taken was a phone number, their number, obviously since I knew my own, what I needed was theirs.

11 digits separated us, well if you're in the UK it would be 9 actually since all UK mobile numbers begin 07, so all that would have been needed was the other 9 digits.  I think it's human nature to look back on your childhood, or your teenage years or your young adult life and think if only I knew then what I know now - that sentiment is usually connected with some deep understanding of the world we have gained or some invaluable experience or sometimes just a warning not to do something.  We often think of those messages we would give our past selves as something magnanimous, the thought may not ever cross our minds that something as incredibly simple as a string of digits could completely change the course of our lives [unless you're a lottery dreamer].

I look at my phone and the numbers of the people I speak to most and it makes me smile when I think that whoever I meet in the future, wherever they are now, if they read this, their 11 digits are all that separate us.  Posting mine would be the easiest way to remove that separation.  I am not going to do that though because for every person that could come into my life and make it better there are hundreds that could make it worse.  This isn't really aimed at anyone in particular or an effort to reach out to people it's more of a contemplation of the reality that those lyrics - "somewhere just beyond my reach there's someone reaching back for me" - once meant a lot more than they do today, our reach is far wider than ever before and that gap between yours and mine, or whoever you are reaching out for is a lot narrower than we realise.

There is however a question which allows us to dance with destiny, that is, how different would our relationships with those people be if we had not met at the exact time and place and under the circumstances that we did?  Would we ever have even engaged with them?

If you really want to wank your mind then think if you ever had a text from a number you didn't recognise had a brief conversation establishing they had the wrong number and parted ways.  What is the likelihood that you would text the wrong number?  For one don't most people have contacts saved in their mobiles, even our old 'brick' phones had that capacity.  If a future version of yourself had ever travelled through time the one number you're probably most likely to remember is your own and if you take into account the paradoxes and causality complications that arise from meeting a past version of yourself, communicating by text would probably be the safest way.  I'm sure at some point you've lived somewhere and moved, whether it was into University halls of residence or whatever, had a phone number that years later you rang out of curiosity to see who had moved into your room - I know dozens of students from my halls of residence that did this, most simply hanging up when someone answered, some actually having conversations with the people who took their room after them.

The temptation to know that your past self was indeed alive would likely compel most people to try it.  I will admit I would try it, I still remember my first mobile number.