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The Butterfly Principle
by
Bob Hyman
I've always
liked science fiction. I used to watch all of the
"Twilight Zone" and "Outer Limits" programs on
television. One of my all-time favorite episodes
was a story about a butterfly. The story took place
some time in the future when scientists had
perfected time travel. In the story, a wealthy
big-game hunter wanted to go back in time to hunt a
dinosaur. The scientists cautioned him that he
needed to be very careful and not change anything
in the past that could affect the future. The
scientists selected a dinosaur that was going to
die of natural causes for him to hunt. Just as the
dinosaur was about to fall into a tar pit, the
hunter was allowed to shoot it. He returned to the
present, happy that he had fulfilled his lifelong
wish.
But the present he returned to was not quite what
he had expected. In the new present, the Germans
had won World War II, and the society he came back
to was very much different than the one he had
left. As he sat crying, agonizing over what had
gone wrong, he noticed a crushed butterfly on the
sole of his hunting boot. And regretfully, as he
was being taken away to a concentration camp, he
realized that the loss of this one tiny creature
had affected the future. Only a tiny change, but
one that - amplified by millions of years of
evolution - had made a significant change to the
course of history.
Like most science fiction stories, this one was not
only entertaining, it also had an important
underlying moral theme that makes us stop and
think. There is, in fact, a true "Butterfly
Principle" that goes on all around us. Every action
we take - everything we do and say - can have an
impact on the future. These impacts may be either
positive or negative. The actions may be small and
insignificant, but they have a way of being
amplified over time.
Many years ago, I worked at Edwards Air Force Base,
out in the Mojave Desert. I usually took the back
road to the base, a long straight stretch of
deserted two-lane highway. One day as I drove to
work, I noticed a fancy sports car sitting in the
sand along side of the road. I stopped to see if
everything was okay and found a woman sitting
behind the wheel crying. She had stopped to take a
photograph of the desert and had become stuck in
the sand. I attached a tow rope to her expensive
vehicle and pulled her back onto the highway. She
offered me money for helping her, but I told her it
was my "Good Turn" for the day. When she continued
to insist, I explained to her that Scouts didn't
expect to be rewarded for helping others. She
finally realized that I was serious and headed back
toward Los Angeles. I went on to work and didn't
think any more about the incident.
Later that same year, I ended up as the District
fund-raising chairman for the Western Los Angeles
County Council. I organized a pancake breakfast
hosted by Scouts as the kick-off for the campaign.
I managed to get some free coverage in the Los
Angeles newspaper, radio, and TV outlets to
publicize the event. Imagine my surprise when a
well-known Hollywood celebrity attended the
breakfast and presented us with a rather large
check. He told us about the time his wife had been
stranded in the desert and how a Scout had pulled
her vehicle out of the sand. He said he wanted to
repay the "Good Turn." As you might expect, our
fund-raising campaign was quite successful that
year.
Not all insignificant actions we do turn out to be
significant in the long run, and we should never
expect that our good turns will be returned in
kind. But we need to always remember that our
actions do affect others, and ultimately may come
back to us - either to haunt us or to help us. Keep
that in mind as you go go through life, and ...
watch out for the butterflies.
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