Butterflies and Razors.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about change. I have a roommate getting married, a friend coming home from a mission, and my five year high school reunion all coming up. I’m not sure why exactly, but I don’t think I’m the same person that I was even six months ago. This semester has not been a real great one for me from a scholastic view of things, case in point I forgot to take a test worth 25% of my final grade. Dating hasn’t gone much better. Just not finding that “click” factor where things just work. I talked to my teacher today and he’s letting me take the test on Monday. I’m working on the happy resolution to the dating issue, but one thing at a time I guess.
Change is a compelling element of life, literally. People, places, attitudes, everything changes over time, as a result we have to change too. I’ve heard it said that you can never go home again. Others have said that you never step into the same river twice. Life would be easy if we found our way to that one safe, good place and stayed there the rest of our lives. However, much like that really comfortable spot on the couch, there comes a point at which the human spirit is restless. I’m guessing for most of us that other things force us to change more often than we feel restless for change, but it does go both ways. Change is a scary proposition, a step into the unknown, the dark. Sometimes we are excited, scared but excited, to see where new paths take us. At other times we walk nervously, waiting for the axe to fall.
It’s been posited that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one hemisphere may cause the hurricanes in another: the aptly named “butterfly effect.” It seems to me that the theory implies that we can’t know why anything happens; there are too many variables to understand why things happen. The other side of the coin is the idea of “Ocham’s Razor.” For my purposes, think of this as the theory that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. I hold with this one.
I think we have change because we need it. Whether we thrive on change or would rather avoid it, change makes us grow.
4 comments:
I agree that change makes us grow, which is usually good. I'm glad you finally posted, we've waited a while for this. I can say I'm not so excited for our five year reunion. I went to a dinner for the farewell of someone in high school and saw about a million and a half people from high school, and it was beyond peculiar. I loved high school, and I liked the people there, but I'm not that person anymore, and while I enjoyed it I'm glad it's over. I can't discount the chaos theory though; my calc II professor was obsessed with it, the pendulum problem, brownian motion, the harmonic oscillator, and everything to do with the "butterfly theory", so I got quite an earful of it. It's a shame I can't spell check a comment.
I was also at that dinner and it was sooo awkward. I still see all the people from high school that I am interested in staying in contact with.
What's interesting is that change happens whether you want it to or not. I never thought I'd say this, but oh how the past was so much simpler. Trivial choices were all that mattered then: play games or ride bikes, drink watered-down orange juice or root beer milk, etc. It's also scary to realize that after 16 years how much we actually have changed. But hey, life would be pretty dull without a little change to spice things up.
Variety is the spice of life I suppose. I'm pretty sure you were one of the three people that actually drank rootbeer milk (shudder). Admittedly the Tampico wasn't much better.
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