For want of a nail, the shoe was lost …” the proverb begins, going through several connections until, in the end, the kingdom is lost, “all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” The proverb, which has variations going back centuries, shows how connections fan out among people and things that might not seem to relate to each other much at all. But people are all connected, even in apparently tangential and innocuous ways. If I ever feel disconnected from the people around me, all I have to do is trace one of the effects of one incident — something relatively tangential to my life — on those around me. Take, for example, an injury my brother-in-law sustained at work last week. It was a broken ankle, not life-threatening, but painful and terribly inconvenient, and even with insurance and worker’s comp, probably a bit expensive. After being hurt on Wednesday, he was scheduled for surgery on Friday, a day I don’t normally work, so my sister called and asked if I could watch her kids while she went to the hospital with him. Of course, I said. So I kept Teresa out of junior kindergarten for the dual purposes of performing a corporal work of mercy and having a playdate with her cousins. To be honest, I think she was only thinking about the playdate. It might have seemed a little boring at the beginning, when the only cousin at home was the 3-year-old, who was napping. But before my sister and her husband even left, they got a call from my nephew’s school: He was sick, and needed to be picked up. Later in the day, we were joined by two of his sisters, who walked home from school together, and later still by the youngest sister, who went home from school with a friend, and Teresa was in her glory with all of her cousins to play with. Until two days later, when the stomach flu hit. That meant no school for her the following day, which meant that her babysitter kept her at home all day, and had to stay home herself. At the same time, Caroline began feeling ill, so she also missed school, no doubt upsetting plans with her friends, who then ended up having a different kind of day than they were expecting. So, in the end, a workplace accident led to changes in plans for people who have never heard of my brother-in-law, and who knows how those changes led to other changes for still more people. None of us, not even people who seem or feel alone, are totally unconnected, and what happens to one of us has consequences far beyond what we see. Our community does not begin and end with the limits of our neighborhood. “No man is an island,” John Donne wrote, “entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”