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Back when I was a young man working as an English teacher in Taipei, Taiwan, I skipped a friend's birthday party because of work. The party was canceled, but rescheduled two nights later. I hit it off with an absolutely lovely lady there.
After we started dating, we realized that we both had skipped the party two nights before because of work. She said, "Wow, it was meant to be." I amused her by listening, but I didn't believe it was fate.
I tried not to be cynical, but I later learned that we had just missed meeting each other several times before. That was in the stone ages, before Facebook, when six degrees of separation was really six degrees, but we lived in the same neighborhood in Taipei, had mutual friends and she said she remembered sitting at a table next to mine at a café one day.
Many point out a coincidence when people finally meet. For me, it might just be a coincidence that we haven't met yet. What were the coincidences that prevented us from meeting?
As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, we are often "ships that pass in the night…on the ocean of life, we pass and speak to one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence."
Whenever friends ― usually women ― talk about destiny and fate, I listen patiently. There's a principle known as "the law of very large numbers." Briefly, it means that with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing can happen. Most lose the lottery, but some win multiple times.
A few days ago, I noticed that nine of my Facebook friends shared the same birthday. Statisticians point out that in any room with at least 23 people, at least two will share the same birthday, the same last name, the same clothing or the same hometown or high school. I have concluded that it is a lack of information that leads to most coincidences.
Last week, I suddenly heard a young man call my name. He is a North Korean refugee who had contacted me weeks before, saying he would like to meet me one day. He said he admired my activities so much. We didn't message for a few weeks. It turns out that he is studying at an institute about 10 minutes from where I live.
I told a friend who is always in a coincidence state of mind, it was more evidence for her argument. I explained that if I had been messaging with the young man regularly that I would have known he was studying nearby.
A few years ago, I joined some meet-up groups at a time when meet-ups were still considered shady. It wasn't strange to me, just another way to cut down the six degrees of separation (just one degree in a small country like Korea). I was so active that I'm surprised the president of Korea didn't send me a personal thank you note for helping to raise the economy's growth rate.
One friend became a fan of my writing and even kept a scrapbook of my articles. When I was returning to America, I sent her a message to let her know I'd be back in the United States. What a coincidence.
She was going to be boarding a plane for Korea that same day. We had joined meet-up the same day, became good friends and now were boarding the same airline on the same day but going in different directions. Two airplanes passing in the night ― some kind of signal from the gods?
Many people were flying that day. It was possible that the plane I was taking back to America would, after I got off, take someone I knew back to Korea. Perhaps that person would even sit in my seat, cursing the unknown jerk who left his newspaper in the seat pocket.
Coincidence? I was thinking that it was simply a lack of information. We had messaged often, but the connection kind of died out for a while. If we had been in touch, there would have been no coincidence.
I try not to be cynical, but when people are shocked about meeting colleagues at a conference, I just listen. I mean, what are the chances that two people studying the same field might meet at a conference for people studying that topic? That would be as unlikely as two sports fans meeting at a sports bar.
Friends say I am cynical; they may be right. Why wait for chance? I'm not passive when it comes to serendipity. Fate may be waiting to guide me in a particular direction, but I guess it is a coincidence that I appear to be running in the direction of fate when it arrives.
The writer is the Director for International Relations at Freedom Factory Co. in Seoul and the Asia Outreach Fellow with the Atlas Network in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at cjl@post.harvard.edu.
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