The Butterfly Effect

The small and seemingly innocuous decisions we make affect our lives on a bigger scale. Everyday we make countless decisions. Think of that accident you witnessed or heard about and think of what would have happened if the people involved had been just a few seconds late to the scene. Imagine if on his way to the car, a driver got delayed because he saw his friend, and so he stopped to converse with them for a few minutes after which he hopped into his car and drove away and he got home successfully. Now, imagine if that friend got delayed and so never encountered the driver. The driver then walked to his car and on his way home, he accidentally hit a pedestrian and became entangled in a legal and medical quagmire. 

Events like that play out everyday. Chaos Theory is a real field in mathematics and physics. It studies systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Tiny differences in starting conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes.

The small decisions we make affect our lives and the lives of others in ways we aren't always aware of. Imagine if your parents never met. You obviously would never have been born. Also, imagine all the people you know right now, the friends you have, the romantic relationships you've had, and how easily they could not have happened had something slightly differently occured. 

Things happen everyday, both good and bad, and sometimes those things could have been easily averted had either party made even a slightly different decision prior to that event. With this in mind, if you could go back in time to change something in your past, would you? The opportunity might seem really enticing, you could have the chance to right a wrong, to alter a traumatic event, to do something differently. But who knows where you would be right now if those events were altered? Truth is you could be in a better place today or in a worse place, who would know? You would be in a different mind state since things would have followed a different path from the one they originally took.

It's crazy to think how complicated the world is and how interconnected most of our lives are. How our simple decisions can affect our future and even the future of others. Turning right instead of left. Saying "no" instead of "yes". It goes on and on. I wonder where my decisions would take me in my life. To greener pastures, I hope.