BennyEast.Com/Blog The official blog of Kenny West

Bookincidence

Something weird happened today.  So, I'm sitting writing a little more of my book, inspired by a certain someone...

And then this one guy behind me mentions another book.  Not the one I'm writing, but another book.  Well, he doesn't initially say the title of the book.  He just says the author, the author is Tim Keller.  He asks the barista in this coffee shop that I'm at if she's heard of Tim Keller.  They were chatting back and forth a little... I think they are friends, or somehow know one another.

SO, I turn around and say the name of the book that I've read.  "You mean the guy that wrote The Reason For God?"

And he's like "Yeah that guy!"

Then he says, "You know it's funny, every time I'm sitting here in this chair and I mention a book, the person sitting right where you are sitting says they know it and have read it."

I said, "Is that so?"

He's like... "Yeah.  That's so strange."

I'm like... "Yeah."

He then asks why I read the book.  I tell him that I read it because for a while I was going to this church and kind of explained the backstory behind the reason for me going to church in the first place... The girl... Then he kind of asked what I was even doing, and I explained I was writing a book... Inspired by that same girl.

And we both were just kind of like... This is weird.

And he was like totally.  And I was like... Totally weird.

And we sort of left it at that.

We chatted some after that but that was really most of it.  Then he left, and I left shortly after that.

I'm calling it a bookincidence.  I mean, one could argue that I wouldn't even have been siting there in the first place if it weren't for that girl.  Or, yes okay maybe if I'd never crossed paths with her, I might have been sitting there at that same time anyway... But I wouldn't have read that book... So then I never would have chatted with that guy about the book because I never would have read it.

There's a whole road of "ifs" I could go down.

I often think about how my life would be different had I never crossed paths with her.  For one, the book I'm writing wouldn't exist.  Over The Bar Scene wouldn't exist.

I would have never moved to Wayne and had my apartment there for 2 years...

I never would have story tweeted probably.  I never would have tweeted so much also probably.

I never would have gone to the churches I went to... Never would have met the friends that I met there.  Although I really don't hang out with any of them much.  The last friend I hung out with was like a month ago and I helped fix her computer for her while we ate pizza as the pizza was my payment.

The if road is dicey though because if you consider all possible outcomes, you can end up in any place at any time anyway given a different circumstance playing out.

Like, the people that you meet.... If you consider the odds that you could have been born ANYWHERE on the planet, and then pretty much had your life journey take you anywhere, the odds of you meeting anyone are so astronomically small that the people that you DO know and meet... The odds of you meeting any one person are so small that you almost shouldn't have met them at all.

If that makes sense.

Okay so, if the odds of meeting any one person are 1 in the population of the planet (which is like 8 billion) technically those odds are so small that they shouldn't actually even happen.

If someone said to me, would you like to place a bet, the odds are 1 in 8 billion... I'd say... No thanks, I'm good.

It's like having an 8 billion sided die and with one person on each side and you roll it each time you meet someone new.

Even if you meet some astronomical number like 100 new people EVERY day... Still in a year, those odds are 100 times 365 or 36,500 in 8 billion.

The people we know, statically speaking... We shouldn't know.

So that's what made today's scenario all the more strange.

Oh, and on top of that, I was sitting at a coffee shop in Malvern... Which is the place that I first met that girl that inspired the book I was writing and was the reason I even read Tim Keller's book in the first place.

I mean, if you place odds on each one of those events and the likely hood of any of them occurring... It's amazingly unlikely.

So that it happened at all is just really weird.

And I'll leave it at that.