BUTTERFLY FLAPS ITS WINGS

DECISIONS & OUTCOMES: THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

Last weekend we went to London to meet a family friend whom we have not seen for about 15 years. It felt quite strange when flashes of shared memories kept on dancing in front of us. We talked about our jobs, mutual friends and yes, about our children.
We are settled in UK and my friend is settled in USA. We came from very similar backgrounds and did go through similar experiences in our early careers. How did we end up in so different places?
When we both were working in Middle East about 20 or so years ago there were two good primary schools there, one British and another American. They decided to send there children there and we sent our children to British school. Was this decision taken after a lot of deliberation about the future consequences or the minute differences in the two schooling systems? No. The truth was that the decision was taken on the basis of what our other friends were doing at the time and whether a good transport was available from where we were living to the school.

Did that decision taken about twenty five years ago resulted in modifying our paths so profoundly? Many seemingly minor decisions turn out to be life changing as the future unfolds. It reminds me of the Butterfly Effect first elaborated by Edward Lorenz in 1972 in his presentation "Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas".

The butterfly effect can be simply described thus "small variations in the initial conditions of a dynamic system can produce very large variations in the outcome over time". The key factors here are that the system is dynamic and the changes happen over time. It explained why accurate long term prediction of weather is impossible.

Life is a dynamic system and future unfolds over time. Does the Butterfly Effect make it imperative on us to weigh each and every decision, however small very carefully and minutely if we wish to get a certain outcome in future? Of course not.
The life will become unbearable if you take every decision after full deliberation, as we take hundreds of decisions every day. When to get up? What to eat for breakfast? What to wear? What to cook for dinner? You got the gist.

In fact the butterfly effect and the related chaos theory convey the exactly opposite massage. Any minor event can cause profound variation and millions of minor events happen every day. You cannot really make allowance for every event and thus can not accurately predict the future outcome. It actually dispels the determinism inherent in the Newtonian and Laplacian view of the universe.
The past or the present does not determine the future; it is how we and zillion other particles continuously interact in the universe that builds the future.
It may seem that I am advocating fatalism and advising not to take our every day decisions seriously. What I really wish to convey is not to attach so much importance on the future outcome in all our decisions that our present becomes a suffering.
What do you think?