Have you ever ended your day thinking what would have happened if you woke up with your left foot instead of your right? If you had a healthy breakfast like an apple instead of that morning taco? Maybe you would just have had a little more energy through the day… How about bigger things like, what if you had said something different at that important meeting? Maybe you would have lost that big contract. How about things a little more in my experience… what if you had just treated differently that one person you really like. Maybe things between you two would be better right now. I always wonder.

I’m not talking about regrets in the path one takes. Whatever choices you made in life had brought you exactly to this point… where you are, hopefully reading this blog, and if you’re happy, well, you have been making pretty good decisions, right? What I’m referring to in this written nonsense talks more about the different paths that life offers and those we take for granted because we are bounded by time… and time only moves forward. We can only pick one path in every situation and step off that branch to a new situation. Sadly we can’t move sideways in time and see what other branches our life offers. We can’t just go back and see where would it had taken us had we picked door number two… yet I always wonder.

Remember the Chaos Theory? It is based on the idea of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, meaning that small changes in the initial condition of any sensitive system would determine different, unpredictable results. This theory was presented by Edward Lorenz in the sixties, and he commonly referred to it as the Butterfly Effect because of this:,

“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)”

Incredible right? Makes you think twice before ordering that latte at the Starbucks every morning. Maybe if you ordered a decaf instead, your day might have been vastly different.

I know it’s not the best way of living having a What If stamped on your mind, I was just born with an unsatisfying curiosity, for better or worse.

Does this mean I’m not happy with my actual life? I don’t know, at least I think I am. But yet every so often I sit down on my patio chair, look at the beautiful Texas sky and just… wonder…