The Butterfly Effect

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            - Edward Lorenz

I am a doctor because I chose Hindi over Sanskrit in my 9^th standard. The butterfly effect. The same way a butterfly flapping its wings somewhere could lead to a hurricane elsewhere after some days. I must say it is way more complex than that. Or else life would already have been wiped out due to hurricanes, if each time a butterfly flaps its wings, a hurricane occurs.

However, the statement I made is one hundred percent true. I might never had been a doctor if I never chose to study Hindi as the second language in my 9^th. Let me explain. I scored low marks in Hindi in 10^th boards whereas most of my friends who took Sanskrit got marks north of 95 percent. The direct consequence being me unable to take Computer Science in 11^th. Choosing Science stream with Biology meant taking medical entrance more seriously than engineering entrance. You can make the rest of the connection. The choices we make, and its unforeseen consequences.

I don’t mean to say this is the only thing that led to this ‘situation’. It was a complex interplay between a lot of smaller and simpler choices, together leading to one path. What if I've had chosen the other way. I can never tell. All speculations are just that, speculations.

Consider this moment. This very moment. Where are you? What are you doing? Why are you doing what you are doing? What choices lead you down this path? Would you be doing this if one thing, just one choice, somewhere along the path would have been different? Can you ever tell what you would have been or where you would have been if you were not here?

Life is the sum of every single choice you ever made. So is it about making the right choice? Now that is where things get even more complex. The right choice. But what is a right choice? Recall a point in your life when you had to clearly make a choice between two things. Now think of having had chosen the other option. The outcome would have been different. But could you say that it would have been a wrong choice?

Every path is a right path. And every choice, a right choice. What is done is done. You can’t go back in time and change anything. Even if you could, the end result might not be what you had expected. Just like no matter how much you plan your life, and nothing turns out the way you intended it to be. It’s all chaos. The more you try to make it close to being perfect, the more it goes out of your hands. There can never be a plan that works out the way it was meant to be.

It is always the present that determines the future. Results are always outcomes of actions. The question is, how well you can determine the present. How can you ever know if something you do now can affect something else in the future? Some choices have obvious effects, while others might seem totally irrelevant now. The effect it has in your future, only future can tell.

The beauty of life lies in its very nature of being chaotic. Consider a life where you could totally and correctly predict the future. That would be the most boring and lifeless life ever. People repent past choices. They say, “Oh! Only if I had done this, the other way!” That is the most senseless thing that human beings ever tell. Because changing one condition can never alter the final outcome in your favor. It is always the outcome of choices you made that you might not even remember.

So the next time, you worry about the choices you make, or think about a past choice, think of the butterfly effect. Every path would have been the right path, and every path would have been the wrong path.