If a bird should sh*t on your Wedding Attire
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| iStock image |
A bridegroom is standing outside the church minutes before
his entry into the sanctuary. He’s shaded by a giant elm tree and just as he
and his best man are about to enter, a robin shits onto the shoulder of his
wedding tuxedo. He takes it as a sign, cancels the wedding and leaves his
blushing bride “at the altar.”
It’s not uncommon to hear cliches like “everything happens
for a reason,” or to declare that everything that happens is part of God’s plan
for us. At the same time, we focus on blame when bad things happen,
which is hard to assign in the case of a bird whose only connection to the
bridegroom is proximity. So it must have been God sending a message, our young
man concludes. It must be a warning that he’s making a wrong choice. He
certainly can’t go ahead with guano on his shoulder so the message is clear, especially
since our bridegroom’s been led to believe that everyone finds a partner meant just
for them; how could he have thought this lovely one was the one?
Particular events seldom arise from specific causation. Johnny
falls from a tree and breaks his arm and when his dad comes home, he blames
Johnny’s mother for failing to care for him properly. He can’t blame Johnny
because “boys will be boys,” and there’s no point blaming the tree, nor the
person who planted the tree, nor the person who called Johnny’s mother just as
she should probably have looked out the window to see him climbing too high,
etcetera, etcetera. No one can be blamed as the cause. Except, perhaps,
gravity?
Chaos theory’s Butterfly Effect[i]
helps us understand better how events often rest on chains of unrelated
incidents. Most of us can likely say something like this: I wouldn’t have
gotten this job if I hadn’t happened to meet Angela that day, and I wouldn’t
have met Angela if the cat hadn’t bolted when I opened the door and I was
delayed, and I still wouldn’t have met
her if I hadn’t stopped to buy a newspaper on the way, and I wouldn’t have
bought a newspaper except I happened to hear that there were new apartments for
rent on the east side and I wanted to see the ad, and that wouldn’t have
happened if my rent hadn’t gone up by $150 …
We all know the jingle, For lack of nail the shoe was
lost, for lack of shoe the horse was lost, for lack of horse… etc. As
children, this lesson was meant to teach us to govern even our most mundane
behaviours lest they set off a chain of events that might, in the end, cause
harm. “Wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident” similarly
acknowledged the reality of chaos that pervades, well, everything.
The fact that the robin and the bridegroom were so close
together just when the bird felt nature calling was sheer coincidence without
meaning, chaos theory would tell us. For each of the two, it was a consequence
of a chain of unrelated incidents.
Had the bridegroom delayed the wedding just long enough to
clean the guano off his shoulder and gone ahead with his original judgment that
they were “meant for each other,” it might have made a good joke for the MC to
tell at their 25th anniversary. “And just as they were about to
marry, this jealous robin claimed him as her own in the only way she knew; she
put down a deposit on him.”
Sheer coincidence demanding a reaction can confront us at
any time. A man just ahead of you getting off the bus trips and falls. Whatever
you do next reveals your commitment to a moral position: are you a reconciler, avoider, or just
indifferent to whatever you’ve deemed to be “none of your business.” What god
would trip an old man in order to test your commitment to neighbourliness?
In a world as we find it today, blame will be sought, and
the injured man might sue the bus company, the shoe factory, the city, even you—for
whatever can show that your “help” made the injury worse. And if a judge deems
there to be grounds for recompense, he may divide the penalty four ways in an
absurd, clumsy attempt at procuring a semblance of fairness for the man.
Murders, violence, war, dissension, all kinds of fearful
things happening around us don’t spring up on their own; they’re consequences
of chains of seemingly unrelated incidents. It’s not easy to trace the links in
the chain; suffice it to say that an unkind word or deed can be a seed that
grows and blossoms into a prickly tree of division and animosity. A genuine
kindness, by the same token, can change the course of many lives for the
better.
We ought to know that these chains are not “out there,” that
we and our choices can form links in the progression of incidents that may
eventually result in eruption… or in something really good. A favourite
illustration of students of chaos theory is the butterfly flapping its wings in
Brazil releasing a chain of events that ends in a tornado in Texas.
Let’s let our words and our deeds be strong and firmly secured nails in the horseshoes of life. (That may be the worst metaphor I’ve ever written, but my life, after all… is more chaotic than I dare to think.)
I Walked the Canada Trail...I mean I WALKED ON the Canada Trail.
[i] The
Butterfly Effect is а key principle of chаos theory thаt suggests smаll chаnges
in iոitiаl
coոditioոs cаո leаd
to vastly different outcomes over time. It illսstrаtes how а butterfly flаppiոg its
wiոgs
iո
oոe
locаtioո
cаո
eveոtսаlly
cаսse
а torոаdo
iո
аոother
locаtioո.
Iո
simpler terms, it meаոs thаt tiոy аctioոs cаո hаve big coոseqսeոces, аոd predicting loոg-term oսtcomes
cаո
be chаllеոgiոg dսe to
the seոsitivity
of systems to iոitiаl coոditioոs. (Introduction
to Chaos Theory - GeeksforGeeks)
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