I'm in Holland, Michigan this weekend for Finish Weekend, a great concept put on by Collective Idea. Yesterday I met some new people that, as it turns out, I narrowly missed crossing paths with before.
The first was a fellow attendee to Finish Weekend from Lansing, Michigan. As I was scanning through his tweets, I discovered he checked into a delicious taco joint called Torchy's in Austin about a month ago. I remember vising Torchy's when I was in Austin last month, and knew I was there around the same time. A quick look through my Foursquare check-in history showed me that we checked into Torchy's in a two hour time difference from each other. Two guys from two different parts of the world who almost crossed paths in a place they were both visiting.
Later that night, I met a girl (we happen to share the same name) who lives here in Holland who was sporting a beanie from a company started by some guys I went to college with in Southern California. That led into a conversation about how she lived in Southern California for a while. Turns out she worked at a restaurant right next door to the Starbucks I practically lived at for my four years of college, about 15 minutes from where I live.
A while back, I posted a picture of a car I was following with a notable license plate frame. A few months later, I spotted the same car about 20 miles away (original post here). I posed the question, "How often do we drive by the same people and never realize it?" But the story above just gets weirder. You can't tell from the picture in the post I just mentioned, but the building just outside of the shot is the Starbucks which is right next door to the restaurant the girl worked at.
It's crazy to me how often we can discover these things about one another, and how common it actually happens. Our lives are more intertwined than we realize. Just imagine if we stopped and got to know everyone we passed by in life; if we just took the time to get to know people, what kind of other crazy stories and coincidences would we discover?