Perhaps the weirdest thing about being a grownup is the realization of the role coincidence and its handmaiden, chance, play in our lives.

I am currently involved in one the greatest adventures of my life. If I trace its arc, I can follow it back to a 30-second conversation in the Minnesota State University Moorhead student union, where I just happened to run into a person I’d known for years but hadn’t seen for some time. Had I been in the men’s room or getting a cup of coffee or having a cigarette outside, I probably would not be in graduate school right now. Big oaks from little acorns grow.

When I have a once-a-semester “career day” with my students, I tell them about the role dumb luck plays in our lives. I always feel a little grinchish telling them that; these are people who grew up believing life is a meritocracy and they haven’t yet seen enough of the world to know how much of it is ruled by mendacity, greed and simple stupidity. But part of my duty as a teacher, especially a college teacher, is to prepare them for the real world. I die a little inside every time I tell them how the real world works, but I wish like hell somebody had had that kind of talk with me at their age (my Dad sort of did, but it was phrased differently; “You’re going to lose a hell of a lot more than you’re ever going to win,” he said, an observation in which I’ve always taken a kind of odd comfort).

But while our lives move to the rhythms of chance more than to the music of the spheres, not all coincidences are bad. Some are simply charming. I’m a big fan of the whole “six degrees of separation” thing, although as a journalist I’ve cheated on that. I’ve met enough bigshots that I’m far fewer than six degrees away from some pretty impressive people. It’s usually more like three or four.

But when the six degrees closes down to one or two, it can be kind of fun. Charming, even.

Karon’s stepmother died last Thursday and the funeral was Sunday. We arrived early enough on Saturday to spend some time with Harold, her Dad, and the numerous people who stopped by to see how he was doing. Harold is a minister and some of those who stopped by were members of his congregation. Most of them were lifelong residents of central Missouri.

While I was talking one couple, it came out that they had lived in Minnesota and North Dakota. I told them where I’d worked in Minnesota, including Worthington, and the wife mentioned that her cousin had once been the sports editor at the paper there. She told me who he was and it turned out I had worked with him the entire time I was there (he wasn’t sports editor at the time, but got promoted after I left). We weren’t outside-of-work pals, but he was a very nice guy and it was a small newsroom, so we knew each other pretty well.

It was, if you think about it, pretty amazing. I mean, what are the odds?

Believe it or not, that’s far from the weirdest “small world” experience I’ve ever had. That, hands down, involved someone I knew in Japan. One of the schools in our group there was Notre Dame. The Notre Dame contingent was mostly jerks – rich kids whose parents had bought their way into the school – but a couple were great. One of those, a guy named Faisal, became one of my closest friends there. Faisal was from Nairobi, Kenya, which put him in the weird position of being an international student at Notre Dame who became an exchange student in Japan. He was of Pakistani parentage (that becomes relevant later) and we were very close.

The next year, I was back in Eau Claire. I was in a bar there one night when a woman I knew walked in with a man who looked Indian or Pakistani. Having just returned after a year across the world from my home, I always made an effort to make international students at Eau Claire feel welcome.

I asked the guy where he was from and he said Nairobi.

“Really?” I said. “I have a friend from Nairobi.”

“What’s his name?” the guy asked.

“You wouldn’t know him,” I said, figuring that in a city the size of Nairobi not everybody knows each other.

“No, what’s his name?” the guy persisted.

“Faisal Nanji.”

His face lit up. “FAISAL!” he exclaimed. It turned out that they had not only grown up a mile apart, they had played on the same cricket team.

The coincidence weirded me out for days. It was actually one of two from my Japan experience; I met a guy there, a friend of my Japanese roommate’s, who had gone to school in Minnesota and was friends with a guy I worked with in high school.

There isn’t much of a lesson in such small, fascinating coincidences. Yeah, it’s a small world, and people are so peripatetic now that almost anyplace you’re bound to meet somebody who knows somebody you know. But it’s still fun.

It’s particularly fun when you’re old enough to know that not all coincidences are so benign. It’s enough to give you a little bit more faith in the music of the spheres.