Chaos for Chicks – The Butterfly Effect
Can a small mistake ruin your life? Can a lucky break bring happiness? Do “little things mean a lot”? Does love change everything? Certainly.
Might the flapping of a butterfly’s wings produce a disturbance that days later and a thousand miles away creates high winds in Texas? If we traveled back in time, would a small change made back then produce a big change in the present we returned to? These are popular conceptions of chaos theory, an important scientific field that deals with situations where a small change in the initial situation produces a large change eventually. My own research ran into this phenomenon in trying to improve environmental measurements. Small changes in the input data or in the model produced large changes in the results, the conclusions.
Back to our daily lives: In high school, a “friend” gave me a ride home from football practice and hit 103 mph in his Chevy on a small country road. If we had crashed, my later life, if any, would never have been the same. My youngest brother’s best friend was killed when his motorcycle failed to stop rapidly enough, perhaps hitting a slippery patch of road. A current writing client of mine had, decades ago, unprotected sex with a local girl when he was seventeen and serving with the Marines in Guatemala. A son resulted, one he has shared responsibility for ever since. How many people have “tried” smoking or drugs or alcohol and gotten dependent, hooked? Choices that seem small can lead to large consequences.
On the bright side, many people have met their true loves through one or more coincidences, events that slight alterations would have kept from happening. Tina Su Cooper and I have been happily married for 29 years. We met in the Chinese 102 language course at Cornell. I would have been at M.I.T., not Cornell, if I had not applied a few days too late for financial aid; though accepted, I could not afford to go without a scholarship. Tina Su would not have been in my class had she waited until her sophomore year to start studying Chinese, which she might well have done, being a pre-med rather than an Asian Studies student at the time. We fell in love and our lives have never been the same.
No doubt you know others who seem to have been fated to be together, “star-crossed lovers.” It happens!
Ava Gardner, a film star of the nineteen forties and fifties, was discovered because her sister’s boyfriend put Ava’s picture in the window of his New York photography shop…a picture of the teenager he took while she was visiting her sister in New York from a small town in North Carolina.
After an airplane crash, news stories often describe the good luck of someone who, by chance, did not take the plane and thus was not killed.
Song-writers are our modern poets. Edith Lindeman wrote the lyrics for the 1954 number one hit song, “Little Things Mean a Lot,” sung by Kitty Kallen. It concludes,
Give me your hand when I’ve lost the way.
Give me your shoulder to cry on.
Whether the day is bright or gray,
Give me your heart to rely on.
Send me the warmth of a secret smile
To show you haven’t forgot
That always and ever, now and forever,
Little things mean a lot.
Romantic relationships can thrive or wither depending on the “little things” each partner does or fails to do.
“Great oaks from little acorns grow” is a fourteenth-century proverb, so this understanding that small beginnings can have major consequences has long been with us. It reminds us to take great care in our choices. As we sow, so shall we reap. We must take care in what we sow, lest we “reap the whirlwind.”
Falling in love is not a little thing, but it often happens swiftly, sometimes speeded up by little things, producing big changes. The hit song from the musical Aspects of Love sums it up:
Yes, Love,
Love changes everyone.
Live or perish
In its flame.
Love will never,
Never let you
Be the same.
Dr. Cooper is a retired scientist, now a writer, author and writing coach. His first book, Ting and I: A Memoir of Love, Courage and Devotion, was published by Outskirts Press in 2011 and is available from Outskirts Press, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, in paperback and ebook formats, as are his co-authored memoirs The Shield of Gold and Ava Gardner‘s Daughter? and the memoir he edited, High Shoes and Bloomers. His writer-coaching web site is http://writeyourbookwithme.com.