There is a theory that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can eventually contribute to a hurricane somewhere else. The butterfly, of course, has no idea about this. It isn’t trying to cause a hurricane. I think about this a lot when I ruminate over life. We tend to imagine that the important moments will announce themselves. That we will know when something is going to change our lives; we will remember the exact day, the exact conversation, the exact decision. But most of the time, we don’t. Sometimes a life-changing decision looks completely ordinary when you are making it. You take a different route home.

 

You sit next to someone you don’t know; you reply to a message you almost ignored; you say yes to an invitation because you are bored; you apply for something you don’t think you will get or you walk into a room you almost decided not to enter. And then, months or years later, you look back and realise that something began there. The strange thing about hindsight is that it makes everything look inevitable. Of course you were going to meet that person; of course you were going to move there: of course you were going to choose that career; of course that one conversation was going to change everything. Except it wasn’t. There were a hundred other possibilities; you could have stayed home that night; you could have taken the earlier train; you could have deleted the message; you could have said no and then your life would have continued anyway, just in a slightly different direction. I think that’s what makes the ‘butterfly effect’ both beautiful and terrifying.

 

We are constantly making tiny decisions without knowing what they will become. A five-minute conversation could become a friendship; a random application could become a career; a wrong turn could lead you somewhere you were never planning to go. Something you thought would become everything can become nothing. A person you thought you'd know forever can become a stranger; a dream you once built your entire life around can quietly stop feeling like yours. There is no way to know which moments shape up how. Maybe that’s why we spend so much time trying to identify the important moments while we are living them. We want to know which decisions matter before we make them. But life doesn’t give us that information.

 

There are no little warning signs saying: Remember this. This will matter later. There is only the moment itself and perhaps that is the unsettling beauty of it. We are all moving through our lives, making tiny choices, sending tiny ripples into futures we cannot see. Some will disappear without consequence; some will change everything and we won’t know which is which until much later. Maybe that is why we should be a little more careful with the seemingly insignificant things. The conversation we almost don’t have; the person we almost don’t meet; the opportunity we almost don’t take; the decision we make on an ordinary day that, years later, becomes the reason our life looks completely different. The butterfly probably does not never know about the hurricane. Neither do we. We just keep moving our wings.