The story starts with a friend sending this video.

My initial reaction to it was, “Awww. And also cool. There’s flags. Since color guard is what I do with all of my spare time, I’m going to watch this.”

So I start watching and only 50 seconds in, I’ve realized how good they are.

Around 2:39, I see some very familiar looking blond hair in the middle. I’m thinking, “That one really, really looks like my color guard coach. I wish he’d move closer.”

And he does, at 3:46. He’s the blond guy who’s sort of limping. And I go from “That looks like my coach” to “That is my coach!” All excited, I start texting my co-captains. I’m a little worried that he is actually hurt so I’m still paying attention when the proposal happens.

I’d known it was happening. It’s in the title of the video. What I didn’t realize until 4:09 was that I also know the guy being proposed to. He’s one of my color guard’s flag techs and my coach’s really close friend. (For the majority of non-color guard people, techs are like part-time coaches.) Funny side note about all of this is that my sister, who knows both of them, had already seen the video and hadn’t realized either of them were in it, much less were part of the proposal.

Anyway, seeing our coach later in the week, my co-captains and I awkwardly told him to tell his friend congrats. He gave us this look for a second like he didn’t understand and then started laughing.

“It’s funny how the internet can do that. The video did go sort of viral,” he said.

This whole story made me think about how connected people are to each other, really. I’m fairly positive everyone will say the words “six degrees of separation” at least once in their life. But no one really thinks about what that means. So I decided to to think about it for all of us.

The thing is, we’re all wrong about the six degrees idea. The concept of six degrees was accepted by most people after a 1967 study. 1967 was a very different world than today. It was four years before the first email was ever sent. For comparison, in today’s world, there are somewhere around 205 billion emails sent every single day. The way the internet has enabled communication has made 1967 and now almost completely different worlds. It makes sense that the “six degrees” concept from back then would be in need of an update. A new study done with data from Facebook users puts today’s average degrees of separation at 4.74. We’re a whole degree closer to one another than we say we are.

An estimate of famous people in the world is somewhere between 1 and 5 people out of every 10,000. This doesn’t include those people who just get their moment in the spotlight and move on. So it’s pretty likely that at some point you’ll stumble across a video that’s getting a lot of attention like I did and it’ll be someone you know.

But this idea is still attached to the internet. Offline, my coaches were already interesting and cool people. I almost should expect this sort of thing from them.

Continuing the spiral of thinking about things, I couldn’t help but wonder from this point how people move into our lives. A million different things had to go right for me to even meet my coaches. In all my Google-ing, I can’t seem to find an answer to how that happens. I don’t even think we have an answer to that as of now. I’m just going to call it luck because I don’t have any other word for it. I’m so lucky I ended up with such interesting people in my life. I forget that sometimes, but I shouldn’t. (Clearly, the proposal in the video has got me all sentimental.)

And to all the people my five degrees of Facebook friends connect me to, I hope one day you see someone you know in a video and have your own story to tell about it too.