Last week, my boss and I were talking about strange coincidences in life. This past week, a young girl walking her dog after a snowstorm was struck by a tree branch and killed. Back in my boss’s home country of Nigeria, an ancient tree fell over on a bus — the only vehicle on the road at the time — during a windstorm, crushing the entire bus and killing all the passengers, including his uncle. He related the tale of, when he was in the UK, a skydiver who’s parachute failed to open landing on a chain-link fence just right to be able to survive the fall from 7,000 feet.
Of course, there are the serendipitous coincidences as well. For instance, my wife, Christy, took a picture of me two years before we ever met each other. We had apparently attended the same summer camp, and she took a picture of the winning square-dance team, which I was on. I often wonder how my life would be different had we met two years earlier… I kept in touch with a lot of girls I’d met at that camp 🙂
The coincidental thing about coincidences is that if they did not happen, that would be the biggest coincidence of all. So what are the strangest coincidences you have experienced in your lifetime?
Already Posted Here
http://barnson.org/node/792
Easily ranks within the top 3 bizarre coincidences of my life.
A few…
Oh, wow–I’m part of Sammy’s top three? That is so awesome! Ironically (is this confusing the last post?), when I tried to use this occurence as proof that remarkable coincidences happen independent of the notion of deity, the person I was talking to insisted that I might well have been inspired to call Sammy at that moment. So, Sammy, did you become a better person because of that call? Any reason God wanted to surprise you?
As for myself, there was the time I sat down to rest at a bank of public phones in the airport, and somebody called the phone I was sitting in front of.
I flipped a ten-sided die once (role playing, of course!) and it landed one of it’s peaks. (They were slightly flattened.) Try doing that twice in a row.
I made a deposit into my bank account once in college that exactly gave me enough to cover a check I had forgotten about–ending balance? $0.00. At the time, I was sure that that was divine intervention mingled with a sign.
I swear to this day, and I have always remembered this, that when I was 6 years old I dreamed in perfect clarity the first few hours of the next day. I woke up and relived my dream perfectly, including the clothes that other people were wearing, etc.
The day I met* my wife I also met her grandmother, who was suffering from advanced Alzheimers. She looked up at us and said, “Isn’t it wonderful to have found the person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with?” Didn’t seem so remarkable at the time, but in hindsight…
Life is so fascinating–I know I’ve had more of these, but I’ve forgotten a lot of them.
*We had met years before, but this was the meeting that would lead to our relationship.
Some weird coincidences
I met Matt’s wife a day after he did. And it was the only time I’ve ever met her. We were both participating in an All-State Honor Concert Band thing at Towson University, and we hit it off. At one point she told me about a dance she’d attended the previous night, where she’d met a gregarious young Mormon kid in a snappy gray zoot suit.
I met a woman in law school last year named Hanah. (In fact, I’m writing this in Civil Rights class and she’s sitting right next to me.) We struck up a conversation when we met last year. When I mentioned that I’d been an opera singer in New York, she said that her husband used to date an opera singer in New York. Now, New York is a city of 10 million people, and at any one time, several thousand of them are opera singers. But no, not only did I know Hanah’s husband’s ex, but she was my friend Stacy – we studied with the same voice teacher, and hung out quite a lot. That’s just weird.
That’s all I can think of right now.
— Ben