P52, Somewhat: Week 9, "Distance"

This week's post topic is "distance."  I could think of plenty of distant objects the photograph: a setting sun, a tree in a field, a storm looming on the horizon, a boat heading out to sea.  And any of those shots, along with a multitude of others would be great practice for a photographer using this photo-a-week challenge to bolster their photography skills.  I, however, am not a photographer; and while I may see some improvement in my amateur photography skills by the end of this project, it is not my primary motivation for participation in this challenge.  Rather, my motivation for attempting this was to help bring some added variety and diversification to my blog and give me a chance to further build and exercise my writing skills.

So rather than deciding on what photo to write about, I decided instead to write about something that I could find a photo to complement.

What comes to mind when I think of the things in my life that are meaningful yet distant?

Jack.  Of course.

Friendships worth having require a great deal of shared work and mutual responsibility to keep them healthy.  And maintaining such relationships over long distances grows exponentially more difficult.  For it to work, you must care enough to work for it.

Frequent readers of my blog will already know who Jack is and how we met.  (If you missed that post, you can catch up here.)  Jack and I share a relationship that neither of us quite know how to properly label.  We are friends, for certain, but there is more too, and it is the addition of this "something more" that makes our friendship so valuable to us both.  And even over the 10,122 miles (16,290 km) between here and Jack's current home in Japan, that "something more" gives a reason to stay close.

With technology as advanced as it is today, how important is distance?  I spend more time communicating with my friends and family over the phone or internet than in person these days, even the friends and family who are mere miles from me.  And I don't think that this it at all uncommon anymore, especially among people of my generation.  We grew up in the age when teenagers lived their out-of-school lives with the family's house phone semi-permanently affixed to our ears, blathering on and on and on with our friends until late into the night...or until our moms kicked us off the phones so they could use the line for themselves.

Now that my former classmates and other childhood friends and I are all grown up, we have fanned out across the country and around the globe perusing our own lives.  Even with all of the miles separating us, our gadgets have kept us connected or allowed us to reconnect years later.  Half of my Facebook friends live more than 100 miles from Pensacola, yet only a couple of generations ago it wasn't uncommon for people to be born and then live their lives and die without ever traveling more than 100 miles from their birthplaces.  What a change these gadgets have brought about, from the first telegraphs over 150 years ago to today's  ubiquitous cell phones and WiFi-enabled laptops and tablets!

For this week's post, I didn't have the physical capability to take a photo of any of the distant things that matter to me.  I thought about taking a picture of my laptop screen while Skype chatting with Jack.  But several attempts at that were unsuccessful and pitifully blurry.  Instead, I thought how cool it would be if I had an aerial view of Jack's part of Japan—not the topographical maps from Google Maps, but a real satellite photo.  After a bit of looking around in NASA's satellite photo archives, I found exactly what I needed.  Here it is:

That tiny little pink dot? Yeah, that's where Jack is.

This is the island prefecture of Hokkaido, Japan.  If you look closely, you can see a tiny pink dot I added to the photo on the Northern face of the Southwestern peninsula.  That tiny pink dot labels Otaru, the city where Jack now lives and works.

This post will publish to my blog at 2a.m. my time this morning.  At that very same moment, it will already be 5p.m. where Jack is!

Over 10,000 miles.  Yeah, I'd say that qualifies as "distance."