The Butterfly Effect

An article by Don Quixote    4 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about the past lately. I guess it happens when you go through something like a divorce. Kara and I have asked each other over the past few years what we could have done differently, what we could have changed to alter the outcome.

It’s easy now to see where we messed up. It’s easy now to point out specific events that we could have done differently, things we should have waited on, things we should have addressed sooner. I guess that’s all hindsight now.

They say that hindsight is 20/20. I say hindsight is crap. Hindsight is nothing more than a rose-colored dream and a misleading wish. We all have things about our pasts that we’d like to change. We’ve made mistakes, screwed up, taken wrong turns and a hundred other things that are black spots and stains on our permanent record. “If only I had… I would of…”
We often want to live in a world of “what-ifs”. “What if I had asked that girl on a date…”, “What if I had left 10 minutes later then perhaps…” No matter how you phrase it, we are obsessed with going back and changing the things we didn’t get right the first time. We want to, but we can’t. We forget sometimes in our obession that we are who we are because of the steps we have taken down our road. Our hindsight perspective is based upon the hill upon which we now stand. We are where we are because of the paths we have trod. The valleys and the ditches, every bump in the road has led us to be who we are now. We cannot change the past without changing our pesent.

I’ve received some interesting feed back from folks as this story trickles out to people we’ve known, places we’ve attended. Some is indifferent, some has been encouraging (thanks Russell), and some has been down right hostile. I’m not really suprised by any of these reactions I guess. I certainly take what I get because I don’t know that I deserve any different. The hard part are those folks who are angry at me because they think I’m too “cavalier” about the subject, as if it’s no big deal to me.

Let me reassure you that this is indeed a big deal to me. It hasn’t been easy and it wasn’t something that I came to lightly. But as I tried to state when I wrote my first open letter, that we’ve had years to deal with all of this. Six years is a long time. When I first moved out I was angry and bitter. I was angry at my friends for not being there for me. I was angry at God for letting my life end up in this mess. I was angry and bitter at Kara for so many things. I wanted to know why all this was happening to poor old me and I was looking for someone to blame. The obvious person was Kara. If only she was more… If only she was was less… If only we hadn’t… The list went on for days. I lived in a world of “what-ifs” and “if-onlys”. But once I let go of all of my anger and really took a look at things, I knew I had no one to blame but myself. Kara was who she was and you cannot change people. My friends hadn’t necessarily abandoned me, I ran away and cut the world off. And then I found myself depressed. I sucked as a person, I sucked as husband, as a father, and most importantly as a Christian. It wasn’t an easy place to find myself in. But I crawled my way out. Granted it took three years, but I did it. I’ve had the chance to work through all those feels and hopefully I am a better person today on this side of things then when I was to begin with.

I cannot change the past. All I can do is learn from it, change the things that I did wrong so that I won’t repeat them in the future. I have confessed my sins & mistakes before God, Kara and the rest of the blooming world. My life is spilled out before you on this page and I cannot take back the words. I am laid bare. I am sorry if some feel that I am not “repentant enough”, I am sorry that you are just now having to deal with these feelings. All I can do is take the things you hurl at me and move on. For the first time in my life I can set things right. I can make sure that I am where I need to be with God, that I can go forward instead of being stuck where I am at.

I am reminded of a scene from The Big Kahuna. In it Phil (Danny DeVito) is talking to Bob (Peter Facinelli) about loosing a big account they were trying to get at a convention because Bob decided it was more important to talk to the client about Jesus than it was to do the job he was paid to do. This lead to a huge fight between Bob and Larry (Kevin Spacey). After Larry leaves, this is what Phil says to the idealist Bob:

PHIL: “We were talking before about character, you were asking me about character, we were speaking of faces. But the question is much deeper than that. The question is ‘do you have any character at all’, and if you want my honest opinion Bob, you do not, for the simple reason that you don’t regret anything yet.”

BOB: “You’re saying that I won’t have any charter unless I do something that I regret?”

PHIL: “No Bob. I’m saying you’ve already done plenty of things to regret, you just don’t know what they are. It’s when you discover them, when you see the folly of something you’ve done and you wish you had it to do over, but you know you can’t because it’s too late. So you pick that thing up and carry it with you, to remind you that life goes on. The world will spin without you and you really don’t matter in the end. Then you will obtain character because honesty will reach out from inside and tattoo itself all across your face. Until that day, however, you cannot expect to go beyond a certain point.”

In the end, that is my hope, that despite wrong things and and wrong choices made that I can grow beyond the point of where I am at. No matter how much we want to, we cannot change the past. Kara and I have some wonderful memories. We also have some really rotten one as well. But you cannot have one without the other. As we are reminded in the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind, you cannot give up one without giving up the other.

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
“Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;”
Desires compos’d, affections ever ev’n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav’n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp’ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th’ unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heav’nly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day.”
- Alexander Pope

“You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the Facts of Life.”

You cannot change the past without changing the present, which means you’d never have the opportunity or desire to go back and change the past to changed to make your changed present the present present (it’s the eternal quandry of time travel – the endless loop).

You cannot change the past, but you can change your present in hopes of changing your future. The past is a compus to direct the course of your future. It is the foundation upon which every future thing is construted. You find the weaknesses and you shore them up. The past is to be learned from, it’s a tool to hammer out the dents in your future, in hopes that your tomorrow will be different from your yesterday.

“The flapping of a single butterfly’s wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month’s time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn’t happen. Or maybe one that wasn’t going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)”