We've all had them. You are far from home and you run into someone you know. What are the odds? Does it have any meaning? In this podcast, Emmy shares some information about the Improbability Principle and why these things might happen. She also shares some intriguing stories that may have more to do with intuition and faith, with some randomness thrown in. Are our random encounters really random after all?
"Yet another absolute Masterpiece!" TLS, Cleveland, OH
Music by Zapsplat.com
www.sacred-truths.com
We've all had them. You are far from home and you run into someone you know. What are the odds? Does it have any meaning? In this podcast, Emmy shares some information about the Improbability Principle and why these things might happen. She also shares some intriguing stories that may have more to do with intuition and faith, with some randomness thrown in. Are our random encounters really random after all?
"Yet another absolute Masterpiece!" TLS, Cleveland, OH
Music by Zapsplat.com
www.sacred-truths.com
Random Encounters
I once met a white guy in Hawaii named Joseph who told me a story. When he was a young man hitchhiking across the United States from the east coast to California, he got a ride somewhere in the southwest from a young Native American man who was returning to his home where he lived on a reservation. I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember which tribe he was from, but he and Joseph spent most of the afternoon together getting to know one another and by the end of the day as the young man approached his home, he invited Joseph to spend the night at the reservation as his guest. Joseph agreed. The young man then told Joseph that as part of his stay, he’d have to meet the Tribal Elders. After they arrived, Joseph was taken to meet the elders. What happened next was truly astonishing. One of the Elders took one look at Joseph and told him that this was the greatest day of his life for in recent years Joseph had been appearing frequently in his dreams and visions. This man told him he had been waiting to meet him for he knew that when Joseph came, he would reveal an important message to him and he was ready to receive it. Joseph was absolutely dumbfounded. Here he was, a young Caucasian man from some small east coast town, with a duffel bag, on his way to California with no important message at all that he knew of. Intrigued, Joseph ended up spending another day at the reservation before heading on to his California destination. I don’t know how it ended, but I’ve always pondered this strange story. What if our meetings are not merely coincidences? What if there is a rhythm and a purpose to what seems to be random encounters?
While I’ve never had an encounter quite like Joseph’s, I’ve had a number of encounters that never seemed to be purely random. We’ve all had them. It is these chance meetings that fascinate me. There are those occurrences where you meet the right person at the right time, and your life changes, or you think of a certain friend and then the phone rings and it’s him. Carl Jung coined the term ‘Synchronicity” that labels certain events as “meaningful coincidences”, that is they seem to occur with no causal relationship but seem related in a meaningful way. Another way to look at it is when an external event matches up with what’s inside. For example, if you are thinking of leaving a job that is not fulfilling to you, you might pass a billboard while driving on the highway that says “Free Yourself!” and it feels like a sign for you personally.
In his book, Connecting with Coincidence, Bernard Beitman, MD describes a meaningful coincidence as when two things that have no relation to each other are connected by some shared meaning. He says, “The coincidence often hints at an explanation not accepted by conventional science.”
But what are the probabilities of just randomly running into a person you know in a place far from either of your homes? And does it mean anything? I think it does. It connects us with a sense of awe and allows that circumstance to be more than coincidence. And it gives us the feeling that the world is not that big. In other words, I think, it gives meaning to life. MUSIC
Just about everyone I know who’s from New York, such as myself, has a story of running into someone they know when they are in NYC. This seems highly probable when walking around the streets of Manhattan, because it is a rather small, densely packed place of just over 22 square miles. When I was in high school my older brother Matthew lived in NYC and I used to visit him periodically for the weekend, a two-hour trip on the Short Line bus from the Catskills. One day, some of my high school friends and their parents and I drove into the city, for we were on our way to see a Broadway matinee and would return home that evening. Our plan was to arrive by midmorning, eat some lunch, go see the show and head home stopping for dinner somewhere along the way. Since we were going to be in NYC for such a short while, I hadn’t bothered to tell my brother that I’d be there, since I knew there would be no time to meet up. After lunch we had an hour to kill before our play started, so my friends and I headed over to 5th Avenue and browsed in FAO Schwarz, the large, famous, high-end toy store with many fun interactive displays. My friends wore our high school jackets and once in the store, we were focused on the displays or interactive games, when suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around to see my brother Matthew grinning at me. He too had been in between appointments and had popped into the store to kill time, but it was also something he did sometimes because it was just such a fun store. He said he spotted the school jackets right away and then saw me. The store was very large with multi levels so even if we had both been in the store at the same time, there was a good chance we could have missed each other. He didn’t live or work in the area. What is the probability of this chance encounter? Did it serve any great mystical purpose? Maybe not. I don’t know. But what I remember most clearly from that day was the event of running into my brother rather than the actual play we saw; I honestly don’t remember which play it was.
Andrew Zuckerman came up with a statistical formula to calculate the odds of running into someone you know in NYC (or city of your choice). The statistical formula makes several assumptions: that if you know 75 people in a city of 4 million (the size of Manhattan), and that you pass 9,000 people on any given day (this is the average of one-minute counts in various locations around Manhattan), then there is a 15.5% chance you will run into someone you know. This calculation also assumes you live there and tend to go to the same neighborhoods and places as the people you know.
Based on this, running into someone you know in a place where you are both visitors would be even more rare. Several years later, after finishing my junior year of college at a university in Kentucky, I was back in Manhattan looking for a summer job when I ran into my college Spanish teacher. I had last seen him a month earlier and three states away in Spanish class. He was visiting the city and seemed delighted to run into me as well and kindly bought me an iced tea at a small outdoor café where we sat for 3/4s of an hour talking. These kinds of wonderful things happen in New York.
My favorite NYC improbability story is Eddie. However, perhaps this encounter is not entirely improbable, but it’s fun nevertheless. That summer in NYC I did get several jobs and one of them was working in a food court at the old Fulton Fish Market near the Wall Street area. This was 1984 and the old Fulton Fish Market had been converted into a tourist marketplace with shops on the first level, a food court on the second level - where I worked, and high-end restaurants on the third level. I worked in the Chicken and Rib place 4 nights a week, a job I coordinated with a waitressing job I also held in the Village. One evening after my shift as I exited the Fulton Fish Market on my way to the subway, a young man in his late 20s or early 30s perhaps, who was sitting on a nearby concrete wall, jumped up when I came out as if he’d been waiting for me. He introduced himself to me and told me his name was Eddie. He seemed friendly and harmless, but I was guarded wondering what he wanted from me and why he had been waiting for me. He was very cheerful and offered to walk me to my subway, a few blocks away. I told him it would be alright. He walked at a quick pace and chatted the whole way. To my surprise, when we got to the subway, he wished me a good night, bowed slightly, and walked off. This would happen with him several times a week. Whenever we got to the subway entrance I braced myself to find out what it was he really wanted or for him to ask me out, but he never did. It seemed his only objective was to make sure I got safely to the subway entrance each evening. Over the weeks I learned that Eddie was a street musician who played the trumpet with a band in the Wall Street area. Sometimes I ran into them on my way to work and would stop to listen. Eddie was always very glad to see me and often took a break to walk me the rest of the way to my workplace. It was a very interesting relationship. He never pressed me for details about my personal life. Instead, he was just very friendly and seemed genuine about his desire to see me safely from point A to point B and I dropped my original concerns I had felt. This continued all summer until I finally left the city because I had to return to school. I’m not even sure if I said good-bye to Eddie, but I’m pretty sure I did.
Fast forward several years later when I was back in NYC for the first time in years, having just arrived from Athens, Greece a few days earlier. I’d finished my senior year of college, I’d lived in Hawaii for almost a year, I’d lived in Japan for another year, and following that, I’d travelled through Asia and Europe until I had run out of money. I was staying with a friend in Times Square for a few days before figuring out a new life for myself in Boston. Jet lagged and culture shocked, I spent those days meandering down the streets of NYC, visiting all my favorite neighborhoods and just taking in the sites, sounds, smells and cultures like a tourist from another country. On this day I was literally wandering around the Wall Street area and as I walked down a side street, I came across a small gathering of people on the sidewalk, listening to a band of street musicians. One of the players was a trumpet player. I saw that it was Eddie. With delight I walked toward him and stood right in front of him, crossed my arms and smiled directly at him. His eyes bulged in disbelief upon recognizing me as he blew into his horn. When their song was over, he told his band to take a break and greeted me just as usual with an enthusiastic “Hi Emmy!” “Hi Eddie!” I returned. He walked with me around the block with his familiar quick pace and I suppose I filled him in on the past few years. He was just the same: interested, polite and quick. When we returned to his band, we wished each other well and I continued on with my meanderings, marveling. Just marveling.
Perhaps because this was Eddie’s neighborhood as a street musician, this was not such an unusual encounter. But I have more stories like this. We all have these stories. Some of them are small coincidences, but others are truly remarkable. Like meeting Kyle Murphy, a guy who worked at the US Embassy in Tokyo. MUSIC
When I was 22, I took my first trip to Tokyo, Japan, without any clue as to where I would stay or how I would support myself, and when I boarded a Tokyo bound plane in Hawaii, I had only $500 to my name. Before I left, my father had given me the contact information for a man named Kyle Murphy who worked in the US Embassy in Tokyo. Kyle was the son of Larry Murphy, who was my father’s boss. I had met Larry a number of times as a kid – he was a nice guy, an intelligent guy. However, after arriving in Tokyo, I never ended up contacting Kyle, for I didn’t feel compelled to do so. Everything had fallen into place for me. As I waited in line to board my plane in Hawaii, two American men in line in front of me, started a conversation with me and as a result, within five minutes I was offered a place to stay in Tokyo and the phone number of a Gaijin House, a kind of large boarding house for foreigners. The generous American man I stayed with for my first week in Tokyo shared a two-bedroom apartment with his grown son. A Chinese American friend of theirs, a young man my age, was also visiting them, so upon landing, I had an instant set of friends, a place to call home, and a fun companion with whom I toured around Tokyo and who could read Chinese characters – which was very helpful. When I eventually moved into the Gaijin house, I learned from my other 20 or so fellow boarders how to get a job teaching English. Within a month I was teaching English, and earned enough money for my rent and meals. Each time I got a letter from my father he asked if I’d looked up Kyle Murphy yet. Well, I really didn’t think I needed to look up Kyle Murphy. What would I say to him I wondered and I imagined after our initial greetings we would stare at each other in awkward silence with nothing much to say to each other. So I hadn’t done it.
However, after about 2 months of living in Tokyo, I enrolled in a class to learn the art of Shiatsu, Japanese massage. I wanted to work with my hands and I was keen to learn a craft that was distinctly Japanese. The class was taught by an Australian man named Nigel Reid who had studied for years in Tokyo with a Japanese shiatsu master. We met at his home and he lived in a gorgeous old-style wooden Japanese home. We met in what must have been the home’s original living room: spacious, tatami mat floor with rice paper doors that opened to a gorgeous Japanese garden and with a beautiful round window that overlooked the garden. There was also a tokonoma, or alcove that is often found in traditional Japanese homes where artwork is displayed. It was lovely. Around 8 of us from various countries gathered on that first night and we sat in a circle on small cushions on the tatami mat floor while Nigel introduced himself. He then suggested that we go around the circle and introduce ourselves. An American man to Nigel’s left offered to start. He was probably in his early 30’s. He began his introduction with the words, “Hello. My name is Kyle Murphy and I work for the US Embassy.” Well, I almost fell off my cushion. By the time it came for my introduction I made sure to add that I knew Larry Murphy, who was Kyle’s father. Kyle’s eyes opened wide with surprise as I explained my connection to him. Kyle and I came together every week over the next 8 or 10 weeks to study shiatsu. We really didn’t have a lot in common or a whole lot to talk about outside of class and I think I was right about my prediction of staring at each other awkwardly had I gone to his office or had we met under different circumstances. It was so much better to meet him in a class like this where we were students working on each other on futons on Nigel’s floor. There are over 8 million people in Tokyo. How on earth did this happen?
According to the professor and statistician, David Hand, if small probabilities are given enough opportunities to happen, they will eventually happen. This corresponds to the law of truly large numbers. In his book, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles and Rare Events Happen Every Day, he argues that more outgoing people are more likely to experience coincidences simply because they go out more.
I believe this must be true. If you don’t go anywhere, these rare events may never happen. But I think it’s more than just being outgoing. I can’t quite shrug my shoulders non-chalantly when a rare event occurs. Sometimes other forces are at play, like intuition. Let me give what I think is an extraordinary example. When I was a young traveller, I took the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Beijing to Moscow, and on the train I befriended a young German man named Andreas. While we had a nice rapport, I wouldn’t say we grew close, but we had enjoyed each other’s company during the 6-day train ride. When we disembarked in Moscow, I was to remain in the city for a short stay but Andreas went off to connect with another train that would bring him to Germany. We said our goodbyes at the Moscow train station and I watched him hurry off with other European travelers toward the subway entrance. I stood there watching him as he headed down the steps, and I remember he stopped and turned to look back at me, lifting his hand to wave one last time. I was sorry to see him go and as I waved back to him a voice from nowhere, but that was inside my head said, “You will see him again.” I had no idea where this voice came from or what it meant but it was very emphatic. We had not exchanged any contact information so I had no way to connect with him. I did not stew on it for long. Instead, I got in line to get a taxi to my hotel.
Several days later, I arrived in the German city of Berlin where I found lodging for the next three nights. During the second evening, I dined with a fellow lodger, a young woman from Ireland named Theresa. Having learned of a bar in West Berlin that was supposed to be a lot of fun and the place to go, Theresa and I decided to check it out and headed there after finishing our meal. The bar was located in the basement of a building and we walked down a flight of stairs to the entrance. The place was full of young people, loud music blasting. It was a very large, cavernous place with hallways and rooms interlinking in complex ways. Different rooms had bars, other rooms were designated for dancing, and others dotted with cozy candle-lit tables. It was a maze of underground caverns. I don’t know how, but once I entered, I knew where to go. I started walking and sensing Theresa right behind me, I tucked my head down and staring at the floor, I led the way in and proceeded through the maze of people and rooms. I never once looked up and as if I knew exactly where I was going, I turned left, strode through a room, turned right through a hallway, made my way through another room, jostled past dancers and tables and just kept winding my way further and further into this labyrinth of bars, until, again head still down, I approached a bar and came to a standstill in front of a bar stool. I could see my feet and the legs of the stool in front of me. It was only then that I looked up, and there, in front of me, sitting at the bar, was Andreas, drinking a beer and looking out at the room. He was sitting by himself, thinking private thoughts and when he saw me, he sat up with immense surprise. Even though I had no idea he’d be in Berlin, I wasn’t surprised. “I knew I’d see you again!” I said as I hugged him. “I did not think so,” he answered. Introductions were made and soon we were enmeshed in conversation as if we were right back on the train.
How in the world did that happen? Can it be explained? I don’t know. And why did it happen? I don’t know that either. Later I visited Andreas at his home in Munich and then together with some of his friends we traveled to Venice for a weekend. While we had a nice visit together, it was not any sort of life altering event. Did I have a message for him? Maybe. But if I did, I don’t know what it was.
Sir David Spigelhalter, a British statistician and Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge asserts that spiritual or religious people, or people searching for meaning in life, are more inclined to find and experience coincidences than people who are not. Others, who aren’t outgoing or observant, a category where he places himself, might be part of a coincidence but are simply unaware of it happening. I don’t know if, as a young person, I thought of myself as someone searching for meaning in life. I had an arguably naïve, but strong-held belief that if I went to Japan, everything would work out. And it did. I carried this faith throughout all of my travels. Much of my fortuitous opportunities centered around a profound connection to spirit and intuition while I traveled. In yoga, intuition is defined as knowing the result of a given action before you embark on it. Coincidental run-ins with people are different from intuition, although I think they might be related. How can one explain how I walked through a maze in a crowded bar in Berlin with my head down only to stop directly in front of Andreas? I’m not sure you can.
During my Asian travels I visited Hong Kong twice within a three-month period and both times I stayed in the Chung King Mansion district, the cheap housing area for travelers. In those days one could get a small room in someone’s apartment or guest house for about $5 a night. On my second trip I knew where to find the nicer guest houses and after meeting an American woman named Ann, we decided to get such a room together. Our room very clean and spacious with 2 beds and a television, with a very clean bathroom down the hall. We spent most of the night talking and getting to know each other. I was on my way to China. Ann had been involved in a romance with a Japanese man she had met in Hong Kong who had returned to Japan, and she was missing him. She was considering going to Japan, a place she’d never visited, to meet up with him again. Having lived in Japan for a year, I knew her plan would back-fire, and I advised her not to go. Most likely he lived with his parents, I surmised, and my understanding was that he had to conform to Japanese tradition which meant he was expected to follow duty and marry a Japanese woman. In Hong Kong, he might have had the freedom to do as he wanted, but in Japan it would be awkward and perhaps embarrassing for her to show up unexpected. I could see all of this very plainly and didn’t know how to convey it to her. She was brokenhearted and missed him. I told her Japan was too expensive and that she should save her money. I told her she would be disappointed. The next day when we parted, she was still undecided as to what to do, and we wished each other well. It had been nice to meet her.
Nine months later I was back in the US, living in Boston and had a job waitressing at a wine bar in Harvard Square in Cambridge. One morning I was standing in a long line at the Cambridge post office in order to mail a package before my shift at the wine bar started, when a young woman approached me and very excitedly said, “Your name is Emmy and we shared a hotel room together in Hong Kong.” It was Ann! As we hugged and squealed with delight, I could feel the other post office patrons grinning and smiling at our reunion for everyone in line had heard our conversation. We exchanged numbers and addresses, and later that week, we met up for dinner at a wonderful Japanese restaurant near her apartment where she told me she had gone to Japan. “You were right,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gone. It was really terrible and an awful mistake.” And she continued to share with me all that had transpired, just as I had imagined. I felt bad for her, but we had a wonderful evening. Another time I ran into her again at the Harvard Square movie theatre, but sadly, life became busy, new friends were made and we lost track of each other.
David Hand’s book on improbability is rather cumbersome to read. I’m not a statistician, but I have taken over 30 graduate credits of biostatistics at Harvard University and am at least familiar with probability. As Hand points out, there are several statistical laws of the Improbability Principle, that when they work together, seemingly impossible odds can be possible. They are: the law of inevitability, that says that something must happen; the law of truly large numbers which says with a large enough number of opportunities, anything can happen; the law of selection which makes a probability high if you chose after the event; the law of the probability lever which says that even a slight change in circumstances can have a huge impact on the probability of the event occurring; and the law of near enough that says two similar events may be regarded as identical. His conclusion seems to be that with the laws of the Improbability Principle put together, we should not be surprised by extraordinary events. If anything is possible, he seems to be saying, then why be surprised by what life gives you?
So, if I had never travelled to Asia or Europe, it goes without saying that I would never have had the opportunity to run into Andreas in Berlin, or Kyle Murphy in Tokyo or Ann in Hong Kong and Cambridge. By moving to Boston, and visiting Harvard Square daily, I increased my probability of running into Ann who had also moved to Boston and spent time in the same neighborhood. But I guess the question is, what is the probability of sharing a room together in Hong Kong and the probability that we would both move to Cambridge, Mass? Were we two like-minded Americans drawn to similar environments?
I’ve always believed that our lives are guided by a sort of spiritual compass. When we line that compass up to our True Life Path, then we can’t go wrong. All that we need, exactly when we need it, will come to us. This is the philosophy in yoga anyway, and it’s something I embrace. When we ignore our inner compass and listen to other voices outside of ourselves (such as peer pressure, our parents’ wishes, the culture we live in) then we are more likely to go wrong. It may sound naïve, but this has always worked for me. How is it that of all the people boarding that plane to Tokyo that day I left for Japan, the two men in front of me started chatting with me, only to offer me a place to stay within 5 minutes of meeting them? While I had some anxiety as to where I would stay once we landed as I lined up to board that plane, I knew somehow, it would all work out. And it did. Here is another story about intuition. Or actually, this one might have to do with pure faith.
As I’d mentioned, I had brought a total of $500 with me to Japan, my entire savings from working for 9 months in Hawaii. At that time Tokyo was one of the most expensive cities in the world, so three weeks later, after securing a promising interview for a teaching job at an English language school, I was broke. I only had enough money to buy a token for the train ride to the interview but no money for the return trip. It was too far to walk and Tokyo is a confusing city with many maze-like side streets and I would have been lost if I’d tried. So, with complete faith, I boarded the train and headed off to my interview knowing I had no cash for the return ride. It was the end of the working day and my interview went well. My new supervisor hired me then and there, gave me my schedule, and told me I would get paid in cash, at the end of each month. With the job secured, I felt relieved, but was still concerned about how I was to get home. Should I ask him for train money? But there was no opportunity for he invited me upstairs to meet with the owner of the English language school where he promptly deposited me and left. The owner, an elderly man in his 60s, sat on the tatami mat floor at a low table in a small room where he worked all day translating books and articles from English to Japanese. He was a chain smoker and the small room was filled with smoke. He invited me to join him, pointing to a cushion on the floor, and offered me hot Japanese tea which I accepted. We chatted. His English was very good and I sipped the tea, responding to his inquiries while I pondered my dilemma. He seemed delighted to have a captive audience and I had no escape from this man and the smoke, and after an hour, my bladder was ready to burst from all the tea I was drinking. All the while I kept thinking, do I tell him? Do I ask him for money for my train fare? Something held me back. We talked for three hours as I wondered how I could make my escape. Eventually I was saved by a man named Jack, an American English teacher at the school who had come into the office to submit his time card. My new boss told me Jack was from Hawaii and perhaps we’d have a lot in common since he knew that I had also lived there. It was now 9pm and Jack asked if I wanted to get some dinner with him. I had no money for dinner, of course, but I jumped up and said, “Absolutely!” grateful to be able to make my escape and hoping that Jack might be my savior. I thanked my new boss and we said our good-byes. As I walked down the stairs with Jack I confessed it all to him. I’d just been hired, I told him, I was good for the money once I got paid, but that I had no money for dinner or the train ride home. Would he be able to help me? Jack looked at me with a face that said, “Really?” And as he peeled off a 10,000 yen bill from his billfold and handed it to me his face said, “I’ll never see this again”. This was roughly $150 American dollars by the current exchange rate, but things were so expensive in Tokyo then, in reality it was more like having $20 or $25 US dollars. Grateful and relieved, I went off with Jack, where we ate a fine dinner and enjoyed our conversation knowing I now had money for my return ticket and some to spare. One month later, after getting paid, I tracked Jack down and returned his 10,000 yen bill with gratitude.
Coincidence, maybe. But it’s also faith. Intuition. The things that give life meaning.
What does it all mean? Is there a reason? I don’t know, except that sometimes I think that, like my friend Joseph and the Native American Elder, maybe we’re the messenger. Even if we have no idea what the message is. I don’t think we have to know. Maybe we just need to show up.
You’ve been listening to Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham. This concluded Random Encounters with music by Carlos Carty, Old_waveplay, 4barrelcarb and by Zapsplat.com. Please visit our website at Sacred-Truths.com. Thank you for listening.