Serendipity In NYC

"I know!" Peter replied.

It was 2012. I was twenty-one years old, talking to a random guy I'd just met in a random bar in New York. I was on a work trip for 99dresses. I felt itchy to explore the city, so I wandered down to West Village — one of my favorite areas — and entered a little bar that looked lively.

As someone who spent a lot of time alone in new places, I was used to saying hello to random people, hoping to strike up a conversation. On this particular occasion, I began speaking to two guys standing by the bar as I ordered myself a beer.

It turned out they were both entrepreneurs too. One of them, Peter, was from Australia.

"What's your business?" Peter asked.

"99dresses," I replied. "We-"

"Oh my God!" He looked at me in shock. "I've met you before. You were speaking on a panel at that conference in Sydney last year. I think it was in Darling Harbour. We met for, like, three minutes."

"What!? Yeah, I never go to those conferences, but I ended up at that one for some reason." I laughed to myself. "What a crazy coincidence!"

"I know!" Peter replied.

We spoke for a few hours together with his other friend. After a while, they asked me what I was doing the following night. I had no plans, so they invited me to dinner with a small group of like-minded entrepreneurs.

"There's just one catch," Peter said.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Well, we're going to rock up at Nick's airport hanger without a clue where we're going for dinner. We'll have one hour to plan the trip and take off. It should be fun."

And it was. Less than twenty-four hours later, we were in the air, soaring past the twinkling night lights of New York City. We initially planned to go to Vermont, but there was a big conference on at the time, so the good restaurants were booked. We ended up heading to Connecticut, with Nick flying the plane and four of us as passengers.

Dinner wasn't your typical small talk. We dived straight into big topics; deep topics. It was the kind of intellectual conversation that I always craved. I loved it. If this was what New York had to offer, I vowed then and there to move to that city. I wanted more of that serendipity.

When we arrived back at the airport hangar, we played a few rounds of Cards Against Humanity and went home. It was the perfect night, and it only came about because I walked into a random bar and began talking to a random guy who had randomly met me at a random conference a few years ago on the other side of the world.

Isn't life magical? I thought to myself.