The Butterfly Effect

I was pondering recently the impact of one individual. I am not quite sure why these thoughts came to me; maybe it was because I was sitting in a psychology class. Who knows? Either way, I was not paying attention to Prof. C. chatting merrily about children and the impact of media, I was instead thinking about my impact on the world, on the human chain.

By impact, I do not necessarily mean making grandiose and wonderful changes such as ensuring everlasting peace in the Middle East. I mean the simple fact that as part of the human web, I impact the lives of those around me. If I stop someone to tell them something, I delay them for a few minutes and change the rest of their day in some small but significant way. I could stir up vast amounts of mischief and negatively impact lives. I actively form connections, purposefully make and break relationships, share ideas and thoughts and affect people’s moods and feelings.

I find that interesting to think about - the fact that teeny actions on each of our parts in some way change the course of the lives of the people around us. We compose emails that people stop in order to respond to; we can determine whether people start their days with a smile or a frown and then how they subsequently interact with people around them. We make dates, invite people to events, stop people to ask for gum, call a friend mid-assignment with a juicy gossipy tidbit, add and subtract from lives daily.

It’s curious to imagine how different the world would be if we had done certain things differently, not necessarily big things, just little things. Taking lunch at 12:05 instead of 12:00, we meet different people in the cafeteria, make different small talk, bump into different folks around different corners, share different ideas, change the content of somebody’s day and the maybe direction of their lives. The ability to actively choose, deliberately act, and in so doing create a ripple effect, is powerful indeed.

Regardless of how small or imperceptible, change matters and just by living daily we determine life’s flow. I like to think of it as large piece of glass with a giant, complex web carved into the glass. In the centre of the web is a pool of coloured liquid. In the beginning, the liquid was still, undisturbed. But each day, with our macro and micro decisions we determine how it flows, which cracks and crevices it fills, until we collectively determine the pattern of life.