I've always been a fan of the amateur study of people. Really, not many things are more fun for me that I can do in public. I love watching the cause and effect and how they interact. And with each person being completely different, the interactions are almost NEVER similar. How one person reacts to a good joke may be the complete opposite of how another person reacts, or even the original depending on the lunar cycle, what they ate that morning, who they came in contact with, what their routine for keeping their energy level up is, etc. I bet you could probably add a couple things to that. Many many more things. What affects your mood? Is it an outfit that just doesn't fit right? A nostalgic thought you had this morning after hearing your highschool sweetheart's song on the radio? If you woke up refreshed? How about 5 minutes earlier than you expected? Ever have those days where you wake up an hour early, refreshed, and you have all this time to kickstart the day? What about the opposite? What if the line at Starbucks is 2 cars more than normal and you know that might make you late for work?
Damn... really.. I could keep going and going. Every single one of these can affect who we are in a day; how we take things; our capacity for handling situations and problems.
Hell, I woke up 3 hours early today, which was bad, and this is the first time I've written in a month (so from bad came good, if you like what I write I suppose).
The number of variables that go into making a decision are so many that we really can't keep track of them all and account for them all. We simply say things like, "I'm not in the mood for Starbucks." WAIT! I know what I just said is impossible... when am I NOT in the mood for Starbucks, but this is for illustration purposes only.
Or, we say, "No," to our friends who want us to go out and have fun, when perhaps really there is no good reason. Or, "Yes," to something that perhaps SHOULD have been a no to, but the stars aligned properly that day and we decided to go for it! Bad decision!
How many tiny tiny little itty bitty things factor into the decisions we make and we are not even cognizant of them?
The temperature, pressure, speed of traffic, amount of cloud cover, the smell of our car, the ease with which we pulled out onto the main road, the level of the car stereo next to us, the distance between the vehicle in the other lane and the white line separating you, the temperature of your morning coffee, the ease with which your coffee mug fits into your car cup holder, whether your car pulls to one side, the kind of tunes on the radio, the check engine light on your car. Man... there are sooo many little things that affect us.
So I ask you, how do you KNOW which one is going to be that little thing that makes or breaks a day? Subconsciously, at what point does your mind say, "SCREW IT! TODAY SUCKS!" then communicates this conclusion to your mood generator, which in turn creates the right chemicals for a pissy mood, which then tell you to play angry birds on your hand with the next driver over rather than simply waiving when they attempt to change lanes without looking and seeing you are there first?
I like to think of this kind of like the butterfly effect. For those not in the know... it goes SOMETHING like this:
If a butterfly flaps it's wings and generates wind... and we'll say this wind has the power of 1. So it pushes out with the strength of 1 butterfly wing flap. But that wind hits more air which slows that wind down, let's say by half. So, 1 / 2 = .5. So now the force that's been pushed out by the butterfly wing is only half of when it originally was created. Let's say for every foot that wind travels, it hits more air and the power is decreased by half. (I'm completely making these numbers up, but the the theory is accurate). So, the power of the butterfly flap wind starts at 1. After travelling 1 foot it's .5. After travelling another foot it's .25. Another foot it's .125, then .0625, 0.03125, 0.015625. Do you see that pattern? The wind made by the butterfly flap never really disappears, it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, to the point we say it doesn't really exist anymore, but it really does. So let's say the next really big storm is going to be determined as to whether the the force of the winds reach 100. Let's say the force of the winds are now 99.984375. Isn't that funny, if there were a butterfly, like in our scenario, and it flapped it's wing 6 feet away from the potential storm, then the force it adds would turn the force of the storm to 100 and thus changing many lives forever. I realize this is a VERY simplistic view of it, but that is the butterfly effect. They are the minute ripples caused by things seemingly too small to have an affect but which actual do alter the course of life.
Now, I propose that weather, as complicated as it is with all the mega massive "mine's bigger than yours" supercomputers out there needed to figure it out, ain't got nothing on the human morning. There are so many variables that you simply cannot factor them all into your "is this going to be a good or bad day" equation. So many small ripples that will turn your day into a storm or into a gorgeous sunny day.
And speaking of epiphanies, when was your last one? When was the last time your light went on upstairs and you had an "AH HA!" moment? When was the last time someone said something and after thinking about it for half a day, the light just magically went on? How about the profound? When was the last time someone said something and that sentence changed your life forever? Or a tidbit of knowledge we carried around with you that has saved you more than once? How do we know that these little injections of wisdom are just that? Or the ripple thereof will, one day, alter the course of our lives?
We don't. The math is too complicated. We have absolutely no clue when some random thing we say one day will be another person's salvation the next. I would expect all great people who inspire others have no clue. I would expect all small insignificant people who inspire others have no clue.
What we can all agree on is that we all have the, whether we want to or not, the butterfly affect on everyone around us and everyone around them, and even the people around them. How far does a word we say travel before we consider it dead? I've seen some companies make commercials to this effect. One person holds a door open for another, someone sees and does something nice for someone else, someone sees and does something nice for someone else... and BAM! you just bought life insurance. Or perhaps the smile. There was a commercial that did the same with smiles.
They are playing on that butterfly affect in that the minute ripples we make just existing go out from us and affect others. We have no clue how it affects them or even how far that affect goes.
The conclusion I've drawn is that really we don't know anything. Then next time you shake someone's hand and say, "Pleased to meet you," could be the thousandth time that person needed to hear that to gain the confidence to go from being a street beggar to a multi-national CEO. Or the next time you hug your daughter is going to be the ten thousandth hug needed to give her the confidence needed to say no when some jack-wipe is pressuring her to say yes. YOU DON'T KNOW next time your smallest gesture becomes the next persons key to success.
So here's your take away from all this. Don't crunch butterflies. You know you have an effect on people. That much is an absolutely certainty. What you don't know and will never know is how much of an effect you will have on them. And you will almost certainly NOT even realize you are having that effect on them.
So when you interact with people, keep in mind that every single moment for you might be that one GREAT moment for them. Don't squander it. Because that may be your greatest calling in life, to turn a child into the next Einstein simply by a pat on the back, or cause someone to cure cancer that day because you decided to buy a random stranger coffee. You will never know.
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