serendipity lives in places

This neighbourhood we live in is teeming with interesting stories. I've no idea why. What started this morning as an off-hand remark to another parent dropping off a child at school turned into an intensive discussion of gender, violence, Buddhism, peace, art, West Africa, India, south-east Asia, Brazil, Istanbul, architecture, giving, freedom, heaven and hell as creations of the mind. By the time we had finished walking together, I was exhausted, elated, dripping with sweat from the sheer mental effort of keeping up, and totally in love with a stranger. By the time I'd walked another half hour to the office, I was just in love with the very idea of living in a world filled with the possibility of making such instant and deep connections with people. It's wonderful to remember that on those rare occasions when we can get beneath one another's skin, we realize how much alike we are, how we love, hate, want and fear such similar things. This kind of chance encounter is what I always used to hope would happen to me, but it never did. As a teenager, I remember reading a line in Henry Miller in which he decried the fact that the only reason he ever had anything to write about was because he was 'the kind of person that things happened to.' I really wanted to be that kind of person, but I knew I never would be.
It never occurred to me that an important ingredient in all of this is not so much what, but where. Hence, perhaps, the huge fuss over spatialized data. I'm getting it. I don't understand what 'it' is, but I seem to be converging on its location.