Hi everybody and welcome to One Small World Podcast. I’m your host, Emily Fernandez, but you can call me Fern. Thanks for joining me here at One Small World.
Have you ever met someone with the exact name as you? Have you ever met up with a friend and you both show up wearing the same outfit? Have you had random mutual friends with someone and said, ‘Wow, what a small world!’. If you have, you are one of many, many people. These things are coincidences. They happen to us everyday, in myriad of ways. Coincidences are the evidence of patterns and connections in our world beyond our control. So you don’t believe in fate or destiny, there’s math behind coincidences. There’s science. But it feels like magic.
Or at least it does to me. I love coincidences. I love seeing these patterns and knowing that we are more connected to one another than we realize. So why coincidences? I’ve always had a funny interest in them, but never really thought of them much more than you probably do. You smile, laugh, and you move on. But after I listened to a podcast episode centered around this idea did the thoughts start churning. NPR’s This American Life did an episode called No Coincidence, No Story. I was immediately hooked. Ordinary people talk about the extraordinary coincidences in their lives. I knew when I wanted to start a podcast, this is what I wanted to do. So I’m collecting stories, your stories, to share and build connections and make our world that much smaller.
There are coincidences in our everyday lives, and there are mentions of coincidences in our everyday lives too, from pop culture to American history.
"I do not see coincidence. I see providence"--Morpheus, The Matrix
"That's not a coincidence"--Leslie Knope, Parks & Recreation
Take any cop show on TV right now. One burly detective will say to another, “I don’t believe in coincidences.” Or, if you’ve seen Pixar’s The Incredibles maybe this line popped into your head right away.
"Coincidence? I think not!"--Bernie, The Incredibles
Or, how about The Parent Trap? Lindsay Lohan classic, of course.
"Well, this is a small world.' 'And getting smaller."--Dennis Quaid and Elaine Hendrix, The Parent Trap
Or, how about the fact that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other on the same day. Big and little, strange and silly, coincidences pop up everywhere once you start to look. Keep listening as I share some of my more recent coincidence stories.
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These are some of my coincidence stories from the past year that I find so fascinating, so let’s get into it. I was going into the city to meet my friend Aoife. I was taking the metro and I texted her to tell her I was on my way. She said, great! I am not at home but I’m heading there now to meet you. So I pulled up my favorite app, Find My Friends. I’m chock full of anxiety, as I’m sure many of you can relate, and Find My Friends is the best app to help me see how far away my late friend is, or more usually, how close they are to me who arrived way too early. Anyway, I only got phone service when the metro train stops so those are the points that I pull up the app. As I’m checking at each stop, I notice that Aoife’s location is right on top of mine, and moves when I do. It hits me, that we’re on the same metro train. The hundreds of times I’ve taken the metro and this has never happened to me. All my friends and family and acquaintances that live around here and nope never been on the same train. I pull up my text messages to immediately text her my new discovery, but as I start typing I notice the three dots pop up to say that she’s typing too. Before I can hit send on my message, her message pops up: ‘I think we’re on the same train’. So not only were we on the same train, we both went to text each other that fact at the exact same time! For those of you keeping score, that’s two coincidences. At this point I am giddy, I am so excited that this is happening. We LOL over text and agree to find each other once we get off at our stop. Shortly after our stop comes and I get out and turn to the right. I walk out of the doors and I see Aoife also walking away to her right. She is leaving out of the doors directly ahead of me, which means that when we'd been sitting, she was behind me. We had been in the same metro car the entire time! She only saw the back of my head and had no reason to believe I would be there, but, this was probably the biggest coincidence that happened to me in recent history and it’s partially what pushed me to make this podcast. I just had to tell someone about this. But who would really care? The Internet. And I'm so glad that it happened because it's just too crazy to think too much about. I mean, I'm certain there's the math behind to say what really the odds are, but it's just incredible that we had been on the same metro train, in the same metro car, texting each other about how we're on the same train and I just, I'm still smiling as I talk about it, I just love it.
My next story takes place in Denver. I was studying for a month there for school and the first couple weeks of getting there I had a terrible cough. I'm usually more of a 'Eventually it will just go away kind of person,' but after a few weeks my mom convinced me to go to the Express clinic down the street. I get there and the nurse at the front desk hands me the necessary paperwork. I fill it out, called my mom a few times cause I still don't really understand insurance, and as I'm handing back the paperwork to the nurse, I notice that her name tag says Emily. I laugh a little and sit back down. It's funny that we have the same name but so does every other girl in America right now. It's super popular and the reason I go by Fern. And it happens all the time, so I just kind of moved on. Eventually the doctor comes to the lobby and calls my name. He shakes my hand as he leads me to the examining room and introduces himself as Doctor Fernandez. My eyes widened when he said it and I expected him to say something, like hey doc nudge nudge wink wink we must be related, a real dad joke, but he didn't say anything. I just got the medicine and left, and continued my day. But I was so stuck on the fact the rest of the day, that the nurse had my first name and the doctor had my last name. Both very common names, but to be working at the same Express clinic that I happened to go to in a city I'm in for the first time, it's crazy.
Denver was a pretty busy place for me for coincidences, as my next story is also from my time in Denver. But it's not actually my coincidence, it's my dad's. And he seems to be a magnet for coincidences, you'll probably hear a lot more about him in other episodes but for this story, we're moving into my dorm for the month and my dad and sister had come with me. And we were meeting my random roommates for the first time and my dad, he's super extroverted and charming but in a very dad way, so he was shaking hands with my roommates and he said, 'Oh, you know I actually went here,' and one of my new roommates said, 'oh, so did my mom.' And he was like well I mean what year did she graduate, we must have gone here together. And she said 1980 something and my dad said, 'oh, well that was the year after I graduated, we definitely must've crossed paths, what's her name?' So we went over her name and she texted her mom and was like hey, do you know this guy? I mean he was in a fraternity, I know you were in a sorority. Maybe you guys had met at some point. And my dad was going over her name in his head trying to figure it out. And he said, 'uh, I think one of my fraternity brothers dated a girl like that.' And we get a text back from her mom. And her mom said she dated not one, but multiple of the boys of that fraternity. And definitely met my dad. So, this girl, who I was randomly assigned to live with in Denver, her mom and my dad had both gone to school together. And the mom lived and currently lives in Arizona, so there's no other way we would've ever met or had any sort of connection and here we all were back together in Denver and I mean at the time we kinda rolled our eyes cause this stuff happens to my dad all the time. But, it's so cool cause there really isn't any other time we would've realized that fact if I hadn't gone and she hadn't been assigned my roommate.
So that's it for today's episode, thanks so much for joining me and as always please please please send your stories to onesmallworldpodcast@gmail.com. I want to share them, I want to read them for my own personal gain, but I think a lot of you would really enjoy hearing them too. Send them my way, and I'll catch you next time.
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