I like the idea of the butterfly effect applied to our lives. Run Lola Run, for example, captures this well with series of snapshots of what happens to the minor characters in the future. For each of the three alternate stories, the snapshots are wildly different. This highlights the randomness of our lives — the littlest things we do may affect our life in significant ways.

This concept is explored often. The most popular examples are random encounters with people which turn into love affairs, and, eventually, one spending the rest of one’s life with that person. It’s hard to argue that what may have seemed like a fairly insignificant event (how many random people do we meet in our lives?) may lead to directional changes in the person’s life.

I received a Facebook message the other day from someone whom I didn’t recognize at first. It was someone that I supervised in summer school back when I was in high school. The message was

It feels like forever ago now that I’m about to graduate from college, but back then 14-year-old me was definitely thinking, “wow, look at that smart kid. I want to go to an Ivy league school, too, one day.” Be careful what you wish for, indeed…

I had no idea that such a small intersection of our paths, something that I don’t recall at all (I still don’t remember what I did; maybe I said something insightful–doubt it–or got into a conversation about something meta), ended up being so life-defining for the other person. I cried.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 18:07 and is filed under changes/cyclical, for reflection, reductions, retrospective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.