The choices we make
I recently watched “Butterfly Effect” with Ashton Kutcher. Not generally one of my favourite actors (outside of “That ’70s Show“) but I enjoyed this movie quite abit. Partly because its main premise tied into one my main philosophies in life.
The original term “butterfly effect” comes from chaos theory and describes the propensity of a system to be sensitive to initial conditions. The theory is typically applied to weather systems, with the notion of a butterfly flapping it’s wings in one area of the world causing a tornado or some such weather event to occur in another remote area of the world.
This is not the same as the “domino effect” which describes a linear sequence of events. In the case of the butterfly effect, the idea is that small variations in the initial conditions of a dynamic system produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system leading to unpredictability.
In the movie, the lead character having discovered he can change the past, learns this lesson for himself. Each change he makes in the past, no matter how small, creates significant (and unpredictable) variations in how the rest of his life plays out. This plays into my theory that who we are and the state of our life in the present is a result of the choices we made in the past.
It is nice to dream about ‘what if‘ and say ‘if we had the chance to go back we would do things differently‘ but the truth is there is no way to predict what our life would be like if we had indeed done things differently. So the answer is to simply live our life trying to make the “best” choices we can and accept that all we can do thereafter is make our next choice.
