The world is not so big a place, is it?
While we like to think of ourselves as isolated in this billion plus planet, there can be a lot more crossover than we think. We call these instances coincidences, hoping to find the right word to explain what happens when a one-in-a-million chance occurs.
If there's over seven billion plus people in the world, turns out you can run into these 'coincidences' more often than you think.
Reddit user, Ok_Ambassador886, wanted to know how the fates aligned perfectly when they asked:
"What's the most unbelievable coincidence you've ever had?"
The unique thing about a coincidental happening is how fast it springs up on you. You won't see it coming, you won't even be thinking about it, so when it does happen, the surprise of it is enough to make you slap your forehead and go, "Whoa!"
Great Minds?
"My dad and his twin live far apart. Without even knowing it, they both bought, in the same week, the same car in the same colour."
Garaquarubyline
"I’m a twin. The coincidences on what we do, miles apart but almost simultaneously, are too strange to explain. Science underestimates how much of what we are and do is hardwired genetically."
DomingoLee
So Close...
"Lost my wallet on a trip to Chicago. Found a wallet under the night stand in the hotel. It was not my wallet but belonged to someone who lived two blocks from me in DC."
voice_of_craisin
That's How You Know You Got A Bro 4 Lyfe
"Not a big deal but we always laugh about it. I was hanging out with a buddy and I was dropping him off at his house. As he gets out of the car I start to drive off, but I stop, roll down the window and shout him over and say hey man, I have this overwhelming urge to ask you if you want a piece of gum. He burst out laughing and said get the f-ck out bro, I literally was just thinking to myself that I would kill for a piece of gum. Needless to say we're heterosexual life mates"
Idontdanceforfun
"That’s a quality bromance right there"
LordSevolox
As stated earlier, there are more than seven billion people on this planet. The odds of running into one specific person whom you have not seen in years is so high I'm not even going to try and compute it for this because it turns out to find someone you haven't seen in a long time is just go to Disney.
Not You. You.
"Was walking around Boston on vacation (I’m from DC) and thought I saw a guy who I interned with ten years before. He was from California and I had not seen him for 10 years. There was no reason he would be Boston but I thought it was him and then when he got closer I noticed it was not him. I even said to my wife hey there’s a guy i interned with, but was mistaken. About 15 minutes later we were walking on a new block and the actual guy I interned with was sitting on a bench waiting for his girlfriend to get done shopping. Unbelievable."
PropBrother227
No, Not You. The Guy Who Looks Exactly Like You.
"Went to high school on the east coast, moved to Southern California years later. One day I’m at Disneyland with the family watching a show and I see a guy sitting about 5 feet away who has to be a guy I knew in high school so I call out to him and yup it’s him. 6 months later I’m at the airport for a red eye flight and I spot him again eating at a restaurant so I say to him “how do I keep running into you?” He looks at me surprised and I realize it isn’t him, but it is his twin brother who I also knew from high school."
Global-Philosophy-11
Maybe The Answer To All These Is Disney
"In 1999, took my girlfriend to Disney World for a graduation present. While at Epcot, we sat outside and ate while talking about the band I had previously been in. Just then, the guitarist walked up and said 'Hey!'"
codallas
Surprise or not, there's nothing more warming to the heart than having a coincidence bring to mind that maybe, in this crazy, mixed up world, you're not alone.
Similar Tastes Carry Far
"I had an old Jeep (that had a very specific window vinyl that I had put on the back window) that I ended up trading in at the Ford dealership in my town. My mom lived by the dealership and watched as it was loaded up and taken away several days later with some other vehicles. Months go by and I drive past a house I had lived in years before, and there sat my old Jeep, vinyl decal still on the back window."
"Now what are the chances that the random person that happened to live in my old house would also wind up with my old vehicle. Blew my mind."
BestKept_Secret
Saved A Few Dollarydoos
"I was driving with an old fully loaded trailer long distance, not quite middle of nowhere but fairly rural, not much around etc."
"Trailer gets a flat tyre. I had no spare. The exact spot where I pull over happens to have around 3 or 4 tyres of various sizes just sitting behind some small bushes."
"I find one that matches perfectly to my flat tyre, which also happens to be the only one of them that’s inflated."
"I swap the tyre and continue driving, thinking what the hell just happened. I still can’t believe it happened."
Beginshere
What A Wonderfully Awful Surprise
"Mom and dad divorced when I was very young. There was no contact what so ever. I was around 10yo when we visited an aunt outside of our city. On the way back to the train station we got kinda lost. It was getting late and mobile phones was not a thing back then. A boy standing at the same bus stop apparently saw my mom panicking and offered to come with him to his parents and his stepdad would bring us to the train station."
"You cannot imagine the shock when we found out that it was actually my dads home. I was to young to fully understand but was happy seeing my dad after so many years. My mom was in shock and almost fainted. I mean if all places"
Ladyvenoms
A Bittersweet Reunion
"It was my first night at a homeless shelter. With nowhere left to go I reserved myself a bed there, and after I was registered and shown around I went to the living room and settled down a bit."
"As I was sitting there, for some reason a close friend of mine came to mind. Let's call him Darryl."
"Darryl and I hadn't seen each other for a while by then, while before I became homeless we would frequently hang out. I figured he must be wondering how I was doing, and why he hadn't heard from me in a while."
"And just when I decided to give him a call the next day, guess who came walking in! Yep, Darryl had arrived at the shelter as well. It took a while before he noticed me, but when he did, naturally we sat next to each other to catch up."
"It was a bittersweet reunion for the both of us. We were happy to see each other, but sad about the circumstances we were in. We both wanted the best for each other, instead we got the worst."
"I'm glad that neither of us had to face the homeless life alone though. I'm glad we found each other and that we were able to support one another. Both of us made it out of there within a couple of months. I now have a cosy apartment with very lovely neighbors. He moved in on a boat and lives in peace and quiet, like he always wanted."
"The end."
Confident_Ad_3573
Home Is Where The Mail Is
"I deployed to Afghanistan and was chatting with the guy I was replacing during some down time. I recognized his name, but it looked like our paths had never crossed."
"We had been stationed at some of the same bases, so I asked him where he had lived."
" 'Base housing' is a pretty common answer, so I asked him what street. He'd lived on my street!"
" 'Which house? Did you know (old neighbor)?' Turns out we had lived in the same house, and I realized why his name was familiar: I had forwarded his Christmas cards that were sent to his old address a year earlier!"
- daytonbob
June 18th
"We went on a family trip to Liberty island to see the Statue of Liberty and had a scheduled time to go to see lady Liberty."
"We got there early and we didn’t know that Ellis Island was included in our ticket (we got our tickets from park service not some second hand group). We figured hey we have time let’s go to Ellis Island as well."
"We got in and went around and we got to the archive and saw we could search all the manifests for every ship that had come in. I called my mom because she had told me my great grand father had come over through Ellis Island."
"She never met he had died when my grandmother was a young child and that is another story on it’s own, worthy of a movie almost."
"She gave me his name I searched and found his paperwork."
"He arrived on June 18th 1920…..we visited on June 18th 2018."
- Long_Fish1973
It's The Climb
"I drove 600 miles with my brother and a friend to climb a very remote mountain in the desert."
"None of us were mountain climbers, so this was not a normal thing for us, but we decided to give it a shot. We get there and after climbing a few hundred feet, I look back and notice someone coming up below us."
"I suggest we take a breather and wait for the newcomer and say hi."
"He gets within earshot after about 20 minutes and we start talking while he pauses to rest below us. Turns out we are from the same state (Texas), and both drove almost the same distance to the site."
"He asks where about in the state we live, and it turns out he knows the town."
"He asks if we know a certain family in that town. I point to the friend who came along with me and say, 'Here’s one of them!' ”
"It ends up this guy dated our friend’s older sister several years before that."
"When he finally climbs up the rest of the way we all recognize him! My brother had actually met the guy when he was dating our friend’s sister, but hadn’t seen him since."
"We all made the rest of the climb on this remote mountain almost a thousand miles from home together."
- Onomatopoeia_Utopia
The Night Of The Accident
"In 2014, my wife and I were involved in a terrible car crash that resulted in the death of someone."
"I was driving us home one night, when a lady ran out in front of our vehicle. I’m still not sure how she made it past the car next to me but our car hit her on the passenger side front lights."
"At first, I thought I had popped a tire but when I looked back and saw her lying there, shock set in."
"I ran back to her as fast as I could but there was nothing I could do. It was just an awful situation and still feels very surreal as I am typing this."
"Later that night, we found out the lady had been a passenger in a car that had been rear-ended on the same road 20 minutes prior."
"According to her friends, she just walked off. Then in front of everyone, including responding police, she took off into the road."
"She crossed 3 busy lanes of east bound traffic, across the median and then made it into our middle lane heading westbound. Her friends said she had been feeling down lately but we never heard anything else."
"Fast forward 3 years and my wife and I are still living in our small cottage on the beach. We often took our dogs on late night walks and decided to go to the local gas station a few blocks from us."
"It had to be around 2 in the morning so there wasn’t many people out but as we got there, we heard a helicopter landing in the park across the street. A young lady had been in an accident and was getting help."
"As we watched, we mentioned to a guy next to us how we’d seen so many accidents in the years since we had moved to Florida from Michigan."
"He then goes:"
" 'Listen to this, my boss was once driving his truck down Gulf to Bay Blvd and rear ended a car by the local high school. He says, it was the craziest thing, one of the ladies got out of the car, said she had to go to the bathroom and walked into oncoming traffic.' "
"My wife and I were shocked, I said that was us. I was driving the car that hit her. At first it didn’t seem like he believed us but we ended up talking for a little while."
"Even though we never got many answers about why she took off, besides wanting to use the bathroom, it was somewhat therapeutic."
"I had trouble driving for a while after the accident, still do in certain situations but talking about it and writing like this does help."
"Another kind of strange coincidence, we recently watched Your Honor on Showtime. It centers around a kid that hit and kills a Mob Boss’s son."
"Although circumstances were different, I mentioned to my wife how watching the accident in the show was hard due to our experience."
"Then later in the episode you find out the accident takes place on October 9th - the same day as ours did."
- spartydownsouth1
The Universe Has A Sense Of Humor
"I was sitting at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, waiting for my flight to Newark, NJ."
"I started a new chapter in the book I was reading; and it was about someone taking the flight from Raleigh-Durham to Newark."
"The book hadn't been about air travel or either of those locales up until that point, but about Astral projection."
"Definitely one of those moments that makes me think the universe has a sense of humor."
- le4t
Wolfville
"I'm from Wisconsin. My wife and I were vacationing in Nova Scotia on a bus tour of Evangeline country."
"The bus broke down (when does that happen), just outside a little town called Wolfville. We decided to go for a short walk to kill time and saw a small cemetery. It was old and had a directory."
"My ancestor from the early 1700's was buried there. I am related to dozens of families in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. I had no idea."
- Current-Health2183
Noah
"About 5 or 6 years ago I was taking the NYC Subway when I sat next to a very nice elderly lady."
"We talked about how sh*tty and gross public transportation is, and after getting off on my stop she told me 'see ya later!' And I smiled knowing damn well I was probably never gonna see her again."
"I kid you not, about 6 months ago I was taking the L in Chicago, when a nice elderly lady sits next to me and says 'hey Noah how have you been?' ”
"Literally like half a decade later, this random old lady I met one time in New York found me again in Chicago, she somehow remembered me, and we had a nice conversation!"
"I Hope she’s doing well."
- ItsDocL
