Do you ever feel like you're on the precipice of something greater? Like your life is on the verge of changing and you can feel the ground shifting beneath your feet? Like any one decision is too big to be the biggest decision of your life?
Every day, we make decisions. We are presented with choices that could potentially alter the course of our lives. From the shoes we wear in the morning to the food we order for dinner, every choice can have unforeseen consequences far beyond what we could ever imagine.
The Butterfly Effect is the theory of small causes having larger effects. A butterfly flutters its wings in this part of the world and a tornado happens somewhere else. A mistreated worker quits his job and years later, the company files for bankruptcy. Our lives are intertwined and interconnected with every breath we take, every word we speak and every decision we make.
But the blessing (and curse) of human nature is our ability to disregard any information that isn't pertinent to our immediate lives. We choose to ignore anything and everything that can't affect our jobs, our homes, and our families.
When we face difficult choices in our life, it can seem easy to revert back to the Butterfly Effect and assume that life will never be the same. It can seem easy to believe that the future will be forever altered and filled with regret from one decision.
But the beauty of this world is that we are in control of our own destinies. We can choose our character, we can choose to have integrity in the wake of injustice, we can choose to be good people.
We may not know what the future holds and how we will intentionally or unintentionally affect it, but we can still commit to being good people today. We can still strive to understand our fellow human beings, to treating everyone with kindness, and doing what we can to leave the world better than we found it.
Here's to not getting bogged down in the future before it arrives. Here's to living life in the moment in the best way we know how. Here's to appreciating the beauty of a butterfly and not the consequences of the flap of its wings. Here's to being the best people we can in each and every moment.
