Chaos fascinates me…not Maxwell Smart’s KAOS (though I’ll admit to some mild fantasies about Agent 99 but I’m over it) but the kind of chaos that makes our lives interesting, exciting, tragic and sometimes just plain strange. Chaos happens when you grind this way instead of that way and you end up pregnant. Or you miss the bus, meet some sympathetic stranger and end up shacked up with her and have a bucketload of children. Or the CD on your car seat slips onto the floor and you inadvertently slide into the oncoming lane of traffic as you try to grab it. Simple things, sometimes innocuous things, just happen…they give you a little bump and, next thing you know, your life has changed.
Chaos happens all the time…serendidipity, entropy, randomness, destiny are all ways to describe chaos in our lives. You may call it fate, the Lords will, self-actualization or Abraham pulling strings. The reality is more mundane. The planet, nay, the universe is in motion. Objects in motion sometimes collide, and while you may think you can calculate the trajectory you are going to take once an object collides with you, you are only seeing a small part of the picture. There are billions of things – people, plants, man-made objects and, yes, even the butterfly in China, that may someday collide with you, either physically or through some other indirect interaction. And you may not realise it at the time (or you may be acutely aware ot it), but your life will change.
Imagine a billiard table – can you predict where every ball will go, assuming you know how much force, rotation and tangent at which the cue ball will strike the other balls? Now imagine billions of balls floating in a spaceship that is m8oving. That’s chaos. That’s my life. Its yours too, you know.