Close Friends

A few weeks ago, I was watching a TV program about Boris Pasternak. Meanwhile, without knowing what I was doing, my best friend, who lives in Germany, was reading Doctor Zhivago.

I called him that same evening, and we realized that only a couple of hours earlier, we had both been doing something connected to Boris Pasternak. We have been friends forever, and it felt as if we had telepathy. It was a coincidence that, at the same time but in different places, my friend and I were both drawn to something involving Pasternak.

Here is another example.

I was in Prague with a friend, and we went out to visit the city. After walking for miles, I decided to sit on one of the million benches in Prague. My friend took a photo of me sitting there.

When I came home, I showed the photo to my mum. She then showed me a photo that my dad had taken ten years earlier, with her sitting on the exact same bench.

It was a shocking coincidence that my mum and I had sat in the same place in Prague, but at different times.

Sky:

At a wedding this past weekend, the bride, Anna, was a close friend of my wife from college, where they both studied psychology. They also spent a few years together during graduate school in Claremont, California.

The wedding was small, and there was one gentleman, Klondike, whom I couldn’t bring myself to talk to because he seemed very confident.

At the end of the night, we were all on the dance floor, and I learned that he researches “gratitude” and trains people in mental health. I found this interesting and mentioned my book, Living in Flow. He seemed mildly interested, mentioned Csikszentmihalyi’s book, and said he had gone to graduate school in Claremont, where Csikszentmihalyi worked.

Suddenly, he remembered something.

“That’s funny,” he said. “I was at a conference in Claremont in 2020 and met a physicist who wrote a book with that title. I bought his book.”

I said, “I was at that conference, and that was me!”

The real coincidence was that we had met at the conference in 2020, but we didn’t realize at the time that we had a close friend in common. We only discovered it years later, at her wedding.