Startled connections

So, I just did a telephone interview for someone and he said something about there not being a 'critical mass in Reading' and it startled me. Why did he choose Reading out of all the towns in England? Did he somehow know I was here? I told him that his example had startled me and asked if he knew I was based here. He said 'no'. He laughed and seemed, I thought, a little startled also - he told me that he was speaking to me from Sunderland and that he lives in Bristol. No connection to Reading, other than me. Apparently.

So is it that we somehow pick up things subconsciously from others, that consciously we have no access to, or is just that as evolutionary hunter-gatherers, our minds are fine tuned to patterns, and so we make links and connections wherever we see them or we notice only what feels most relevant or figural. Like when someone shouts our name, we hear it, among a babble of other background sounds...as then for me, among the babble of his speech, the word 'Reading' became figural.

I know what the scientists would say. There is no coincidence. It's just a connection that you pick up on and may in actual fact not really be a connection at all. Out of all the millions of unrelated words that are uttered, we focus on the ones that have meaning to us. I don't know how I feel about that. I live my life based on these networks of connections - they are what take me closer to my goal and provide me with opportunities that were previously not presented to me. There's nothing magical about this - I just take the golden strands that are offered to me and see where they lead. Do we create our own connections, or is there some bigger, deeper way in which we're all connected?

I know how some of you would respond and I am not sure that your responses would influence me massively, because ultimately none of us 'know' the answer. We believe certain things, but we don't know for sure.

Does it matter anyway?