Ripple Effects
What goes around, can come around
“It’s a small world,” some say. It might not be literally true. The Earth has a surface area of around 510 million km squared and a human population in the billions. But there is a grain of truth to the expression. A simple act can really go a long way.
I certainly know this all too well from experience. I’ve seen a simple absence lead to major conflicts. Closed door arguments becoming cannon fodder for distantly related fights later on.
But not all of it is just gloom and doom. I have also witnessed everyday acts of kindness convince people to keep going. Random curiosity resulting in finding the closest of friends and allies.
The concept of the butterfly effect can seem implausible. Surely if a certain action didn’t occur at the exact time in specific circumstances, something else would have happened anyway to balance reality, right? Yet…some events have very narrow causes. If even one thing was different, the trajectory could have changed a good bit.
Let’s take a fatal car accident in fair weather and traffic. The sun was shining and there weren’t too many cars around, but tragedy still struck. This can haunt the survivors. What if they had left a few minutes earlier or later? Could the crash have been prevented?
To be objective, it’s very well possible that it could’ve been avoided if one circumstance was different. There are a lot of things that have to be put together to result in vehicles crashing on a nice day.
At the same time, these are also rather unpredictable. You can’t just guess whether another driver you don’t know is going to be startled or drunk on a given day. Self-blame on a victim’s part is often unnecessary.
On the other hand, there are deliberate deeds which can snowball despite being small at first. Let’s start with a good example. A simple compliment may boost someone’s confidence enough to survive a large presentation. If that presentation is vital to a large service, you could help create a large part of history.
Likewise, warning one friend about a person’s horrid behaviors can end in the word being spread to a large number of people and damaging the person’s reputation. Conversely, ruining a person’s good name over false allegations given to a colleague is a jerk move.
So next time you do something, think of what the potential consequences could be. Don’t stress yourself out over it. Not everything can be controlled, such as in that car accident above.
But some factors can be.
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