The Butterfly Effect

Have you ever wondered how your life would be altered if you had made different choices in your past? These choices don't necessairily have to be choices that you regret, just choices that had any impact on your life whatsoever. "Wait a minute!" you might exclaim, "But EVERY choice I make, not matter HOW small, has SOME impact on my life!" Yes Socrates, that is correct...no matter how small a choice you make may be, it still has an impact on your life; the ramifications of some of these choicies are even greater than you can fathom.

The term, "The Butterly Effect" was coined by one Edward Norton Lorenz, a pioneer of the Chaos Theory. In the laymans terms, the Chaos Theory states that a small difference in initial conditions of a system will have wide effects in the long term. While it may sound a bit extreme, the most commonly used example of this would be a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the earth and through multiple chains of events causing a hurricane on the other side; this is where the "Butterfly Effect" gets its name.

Think, for example, if you decided one morning to read a good book instead of watching the news before you went to work. If you would have watched the news, you would have seen that it was going to rain later on that day, but because you didn't, you didn't bring a jacket and you got wet; later on got sick because of it. You got so sick, in fact, that you got fired from your job for missing so many days of work, all because of the fact that you decided to be an intellectual person one morning instead of being a couch potato. You never know the true outcome of your actions.

There are so many times in my own life where I can point to certain choices that have made by others or me that have changed the direction of my life completely, and I have not even begun to consider how other people's live have been changed by the smallest choices that I have made. One example from my own life would be when I met my friend Joe. We had a mutual friend named Mike who was riding bikes with Joe when Joe ran over a broken bottle in the road. Mike realized that my house was nearby and decided to bring Joe over to see if his bike could be repaired. I know for a fact that Joe's life and My life have been impacted dramatically by each other, our personalities and aquaintences, and it was all because of the fact that some drunk guy made the choice to leave his beer bottle in the middle of the road.

The worst part about the Butterfly Effect is that while the choices you make have huge impacts on your own life, the choices of others have just as great effects. You can't control whether or not someone will sneeze on your and get you sick, or spill hot coffee on you just before your important job interview. The smallest things can make your life have the biggest turns, and while you don't have the ability to control how others impact your life, you do have the ability to control the actions that you make that will change your own life and other's lives. You cannot always see the later effects of your most immediate actions, but I hope that I have now opened your eyes to the imporance of every single decision you make. Be careful about everything you say and everything you do, because choosing to walk, bike, or take the bus could have huge ramifications in the long run.