Hey you,

Sometimes, have you just had it up to your eyeballs in the world’s troubles? I did recently. Nothing I did made a dent in anything. I could be kind on social media and the deluge continued, smiled at people in stores and life went on, prayed and sang and exercised with the rest of the world and was still obliged to keep waiting. I could either lose it or keep it together, and in the end the world would keep on doing its thing.

I’ve been learning about patience in this time, which is frankly a beautiful and terrible thing — however before I could reach the point of patience there was another necessary step to take.

Remember ‘Gone with the Wind?’ For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a story set around a beautiful, willful young woman in the Civil War era. A southern belle, somewhat reckless and stubborn as all get out, and about to have her world rocked again and again. It’s a testimony to how stubbornness can help you survive, but not get you what you want.

Stubborn about getting a job with a good work culture, great! Stubborn about getting someone to change in a way you think they should change? Errrrrhhhh, reject.

Scarlett was stubborn in both ways, as most people are apt to be to some degree or another — though in terms of self-awareness she was definitely off the spectrum. The story is complex, but essentially her main love story (not the one in her head) was with a man about as much a tumultuous sinner as she, who loved her, or at least was certainly attracted to her, and eventually married her. Even so she just couldn’t let go of her love from the man she wanted to marry at the beginning of the story, even as she scooted through several ill-advised marriages. In the end, when she was married to Rhett, they are just on the cusp of reconciling when tragedy tears them both up. He leaves her with these final words:

Frankly m’dear, I don’t give a damn.

There the movie ends. Jolly, right? It rocked Hollywood, as one of the first movies to include swearing, but it also has the potential to rock on several more levels, as people and their lives tend to do. It’s frustrating from the outside because why couldn’t she just let the other guy go? Why didn’t the second guy love her well enough to win her over? Why, why, why?

Dangerous question, why. Sometimes we have to pick the question up and examine it from all angles, sometimes it’s better to set it down and trust. When it comes to other people, it’s a good question to ask but not try to answer too dogmatically. At any rate, anyone who has lived a minute or two on earth knows it’s not so simple to just tell people, “do this” and have it happen. Free will is an obstruction for one thing, and I don’t know about you, but my feelings got plenty of free and will. They think they’re free to roam as they please, and they’re willful.

It is why I found myself in a state of emotional angst recently. I couldn’t do enough for my feelings or anyone else’s. I mean, I couldn’t even breath without perpetuating the pandemic. When did being alive become so penalized? It brought to mind the butterfly effect, and the idea that a wittle-bitty butterfly in the Amazon can cause a tornado in Tokyo. Devastating. Such responsibility is too much for me. A butterfly’s movement and my breath destroying a part of the world? I can’t.

It is where I found myself asking this question: with probably at least half a million butterflies flapping their wings at any given time, why aren’t there constant tornadoes? Have we begun to expect something from the butterfly it can’t constantly realize? Imagine all the pressure on butterflies! “Now we know you’re a fragile and beautiful creature, but why aren’t you also creating tornadoes? Now get out there and change the world, you world-changer you!” I can see the Pinterest quote already, “she may look fragile, but she is a whirlwind.”

Inspiring? Maybe, but recently I’ve begun to ask if I understood the butterfly effect at all. Is it a basis for change, or an interruption? I Googled “butterfly effect” and it led to chaos theory. Have you heard of chaos theory? I hadn’t. I dug down into the internet about a millimetre and found that chaos theory began to emerge when linear systems and measurables did not yield accurate predictions for the future. MIT meteorology prof, Edward Lorenz, who thought that since weather is determined by measurable factors such as temperature, pressure, and wind velocity, one should be able to take a good model, computer and data, and predict weather well into the future. Accordingly he set up equations and programmed them. Here is an excerpt from the article:

He input an initial set of data, switched the computer on, and waited for the printout.  Placing the output next to the machine, he decided to re-enter some of the data and run the program longer.  Typing it in meticulously, he was astonished to find that the program yielded a radically different forecast.  Finally, he realized that the computer printout had rounded the data, and what he had input was slightly different the second time than the first.  Somehow, even for a straightforward, deterministic set of equations, a minute change in initial conditions yielded radically different behavior.

As he would later note, in what was dubbed the ‘butterfly effect,’ the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions meant that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings over the Amazon could influence the weather in China.  This phenomenon, pioneered by Lorenz and others, has found widespread application as deterministic chaos.

This, by the way, is why you have to take environmental predictions with a grain of salt, because the models used to predict climate change are not programmed to factor in deterministic chaos — simply because no one has that much data or information to make those models. We can crunch data, project trends, look at rhythms all we want and in the end, a lovely butterfly flapping her wings can change the initial conditions to the point that all the predictions come out vastly different than expected.

The butterfly effect, is not the originator of conditions, as I thought, but the physical representation of something we have measured being changed by a very slight “interrupter” if you will. That’s an imperfect way to put it, but I’m not a scientist - I can only hope I’m not butchering this entirely. I’m not approaching this as a scientist though, but as an amateur philosopher who thinks this holds significant meaning for those of us wondering how Jill down the street can do the exact same things we do, with almost exactly the same conditions, and meet an entirely different outcome. I mean, hello, look at her perfect life! But we went to the same school, our parents held the same sort of jobs, and we both have about the same amount of kids.

The Butterfly effect means that something we can’t see, and can barely feel, can change the entire outcome. It doesn’t always have to be earth-shaking to change our lives.

On the other hand, it also means we ought to have great hope, because earth-shaking, cataclysmic events could be changed by a butterfly’s wing.

On the cusp of my distress, wondering how on earth any of us can make decisions and effect behavior that makes any difference, is when I realize that we are able to measure many things, predict many things, and keep learning endlessly. Curiosity, intelligence, hope, experiments, and so on and forth are great things! We are discoverers of the universe, but unless we allow it to point us to the Creativity of the person with all the data, all the facts and essentially, a finger on all these complicated threads, we will simply become overwhelmed and jaded by a world that is too immense for us to understand.

Think of it, in thousands and thousands and thousands of years some of the best minds, and there have been amazing minds, are just now getting past the molecular level of how the universe is constructed. It is incredibly intricate, balanced, and just because we don’t have the mathematical knowledge to know yet how deterministic chaos works, means that at all times human minds must learn to bow human prowess to a higher power, higher intelligence, and perfect Spirit. As Paul Halpern notes in his article:

We owe Lorenz a debt for finding a key flaw in Laplacean determinism. Even in Newtonian classical mechanics, with its clockwork regularity, some systems are so sensitive to initial conditions that they are effectively impossible to predict. Unless you know every data point with perfect precision—next to impossible with realistic measuring devices—such chaotic systems act as randomly as a series of coin tosses. Thus along with randomness in quantum systems, effective randomness in some classical systems, such as the weather, seems a key feature of nature. God plays dice in more ways than one.

At this point I realize it is possible to stop worrying about what people think and feel based on my actions alone. I simply don’t have enough facts to change anything, the best I can hope for is to be the butterfly who throws a monkey wrench into the initial calculations. This can go both ways, for good or ill.

The last thing we ought to do is assume we are the basis of the universe, in full possession of the facts, with actions which determine eventual outcomes. We have influence in our universe, we are subject to cause and effect, but the world strangely (!) does not revolve around us. Let’s take the fact that some people think we civilians must wear masks out in public, and some think it’s a bad idea. Leaving what I think out of it, there’s context and data on either side of the question. We ought to look at these questions, we ought to make decisions as best as we can, but the last thing I’m going to do is assume that everyone with an opinion has all the facts, because as we now see, no one does. We take the facts we do have currently, and make decisions based on the cause and effect we do know, and hope it will turn out a certain way in the future. We have to recognize that outcomes may vary based on things we don’t know or can’t see. We don’t know every layer and system and happening in our universe. We’re not God, which we ought to remember for ourselves and our doctors.

My point is not as fatalistic as you think. You may think, it doesn’t matter what I do, I can’t control it. Of course you can’t. Of course I can’t. Not even Fauci or Trump can control it. All of us have got to admit there is a universe out of our control. That is all. It is not ours to damn or not to damn. We can cause some serious destruction and we can facilitate a restoration, but it is not ours. We are stewards, and the best stewards are the ones who know the original creator and designer. That’s a great deal of our trouble - many of us aren’t on working terms with God, and because of this the steps we make are based on a love of people or the earth, not love of God that flows from us to people and the earth. Love that leaves God out of the picture is counterfeit, based on what can’t be the foundation of love: humanity.

Note: I’m not going to even say Christians, because that is a classification label, another way to measure. It is not the definition of someone who knows God. We need those categories and we need ways to express things, but as with all words, all systems, all thoughts, they must at heart contain God.

Once I realized this I was liberated, free as a bird, because it was not my damn to give anymore. You wear a mask, you don’t. We all hold responsibility to one another, but we don’t own the outcomes of the world or COVID and until we realize that we will go about staggering as we have been doing, carrying a weight that is not ours to carry.

Does this mean I get to stop caring? No. Caring, I can do, but caring and carrying are two different things. Using the brain God gave me to think critically and to advance and to learn as much as I can, that is great. Using my abilities and human life to serve mankind in whatever way I can, absolutely. But my first allegiance is to the owner of all information, the one who has set systems in place we are just barely beginning to understand. Take the center out of a universe and nothing makes sense anymore. Put him back in, and we have the keys to everything important, even if we are not in full possession of the facts. By all means care, love, and cherish our world and its people, but realize that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.

Seek God, and ask him where we are in our current trajectories and mathematical calculations. He is the only one who actually knows the outcome. All those Sunday School classes where I tried to wrap my mind around how free will works in conjunction with God knowing everything that is going to happen, begins to make a little more sense in chaos theory

My final word? Stop giving damns.

Keep breathing.

L. Raine

Photo up top by Mick Haupt