BUTTERFLY EFFECT

“If we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” By the end of the 19th Century, John Muir was a powerful voice for the preservation of wilderness areas in the United States. In large part, the National Parks System is the result of his efforts. From all of his books and letters, this is my favorite ‘Muir’ quote. His, 'Everything else' is often referred to as the interdependent web. If any point on any thread is disturbed, the rest of the web feels the tug and pulls back. The ‘Butterfly Effect’ is part of Chaos Theory but also speaks to Muir’s sensibility. It stipulates that in a Japanese flower garden, the air disturbed by a single butterfly will, weeks later, through millions of delicate interactions, influence the exact point of a hurricane’s landfall on the Carolina coast. 

I think it is the same with people. There is no way to know how today’s actions will be manifest on others, maybe strangers, later, maybe much later, maybe far away. It’s not too much to say, ‘. . . everyone I meet changes my life.’ Living in a constant state of flux, I can’t have lunch with you or watch a child feeding geese in the park without being changed. We feel that tug on the web and we push or pull back, just a little. They say that baseball is a game of inches. It’s not about the 400 foot home run. It’s the one inch off the sweet spot on the bat that turns a would be home run into a foul ball. I don’t know who all has had a hand in the shaping of my life but there are so many other fingerprints on my character and my experience that it boggles the mind. 

In public, from a distance, Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela have touched my life but so has Timothy McVeigh. In private, up close, the names are not so familiar. Harry Klutz was a history teacher, a gay man in the 1950’s, the only adult in my life ever to tell me that I could do anything, be anything I wanted to be. Then there was Sgt. James Talbot, one of my superiors in the army. He said I was worthless, an embarrassment. I remember them both long after the fact, compelled to validate one’s view and dispel the other. Life lessons are about what to emulate, what to reject, what to embrace and what to avoid. They are usually prompted by someone who doesn’t realize they are being modeled at the time. I’ve discovered that it’s all a game of inches, a game of moments. Who falls under the reach of my little life is beyond me, I don’t really want to know but I do know this; you can not touch another life without being touched in return. The near misses and the home runs, they keep tugging at the web. I feel them in every breath.