In his excellent book “Innumeracy”, John Allen Paulos discusses the likelihood of seemingly improbable events happening to us on a road trip. He illustrates how two people from opposite sides of the US meet on a train, and each person has met around 1,500 people in their lives. While the chance of one of the two directly knowing one of the other’s contacts is only 1%, there is more than a 99% chance that at least one pair of their acquaintances know one other. We are just rarely able to make that connection in a random conversation with a stranger.
One such strange “it’s a small world” moment happened to me in the south of New Zealand. We had driven to Milford Sound, and after a day of rain watching and a cancelled kayak trip had decided to drive back to Te Anau. We had been talking to a couple of British girls in the cafe, and as they were heading out and waiting for the bus we offered them a ride.
After an hour or so of talking about travels, home, work etc., we discovered that one of the girls had been dating a guy I had been working with and training for some time just before our trip, and in fact he had shared with me over a beer his frustrations with a current girlfriend! I obviously kept silent on this point, but we remarked on how strange it was that we found this link from our home country 11,000 miles away.
I have heard many other stories of those chance enounters that are hard to believe. But as John Allen Paulos suggests, maybe they are out there all around us – it’s just up to our curiosity and investigative skills to discover them.
