Fragment of article - Butterfly Effect - Feb 2016

The Butterfly Effect

 

 

In 2004, the movie “The Butterfly Effect” was released starring Ashton Kutcher. It was the first time I had heard the term, and the phenomenon it described blew my mind.

 

If we have the good fortune to live long enough to have some disappointments in our lives, the idea of “What if?” will eventually plague us. Often it becomes an “if only”. If only I had gone to a better college (or college at all). If only I had won that talent contest, If only I hadn’t married him or her. If only we had been able to have children. If only I had forgiven my mother, father, friend. If only I knew then what I know now.

 

We imagine that somehow if this one thing had been different, somehow our lives would have been, well — better.

 

The butterfly effect is part of a field of study called Chaos Theory. As an aspiring Buddhist, who is working with the idea of uncertainty as a basic truth of human existence, simply the term Chaos Theory made me want to know more.

 

I did a little research on the term Butterfly Effect and found that it was first coined by mathematician and meterologist Edward Norton Lorenz in the 1960’s.  He became skeptical of the linear models of weather prediction and observed that most phenomenon that effected the atmosphere were non-linear in nature. This lead him to create models that accounted for these variations.

 

Lorenz discovered that a small change in one state of a nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

 

To help less brilliant minds grasp the concept, he used the metaphor of a hurricane’s trajectory being influenced by something as minor as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly. In what may be a unrelated coincidence, a graphical mapping of an element of this effect results in the shape of a butterfly.

 

I now understand why the Facebook page, “I love fucking science” has 25 million likes!

 

But I digress.

 

There have been circumstances and choices in my life that I have wondered “if only”. If only I hadn’t broken up with my first true love, if only I hadn’t married the wrong guy for me, if only I hadn’t sold my apartment in Manhattan. Some of them get rough.

 

When I actually took the time to go back through my life, I realized that it has not been those big life decisions that have contributed to my life as I know it, but it is also the smallest acts. And in many cases, the outcome has been wonderful.

 

If I hadn’t been asked at age 18 to photograph my friend’s high school performance, I would not have been “bitten” by the love of photography. From that moment, I walked around with the burning question of “how does one become a photographer”. At the time I was working in a dead end job as a clerk on Wall Street. Had I not gone in for a slice of pizza that one afternoon, I would not have stumbled upon the ad for the photography class in the local flyer