“Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.”

– Paul Dirac

Isn’t it funny how every time we think we’ve understood a concept somebody comes along and forces us to open our  minds and think to the next level?  We’ve all heard the questions posed by the theory called the Butterfly Effect — If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, will it cause a tornado in Texas, and others like it serve to remind us that the events that occur in our physical world do not take place in isolation.  Each action has a reaction, and every move that any of us makes carries the energy we have expended to make it happen far beyond our own location.  I send a marble into a ring of string.  It hits another marble and transfers its energy so that the second one flies out of its spot and ends up pocketed as the prize for my accuracy.  A baseball is pitched, and as it crosses home plate, a player swings his bat.  He uses energy to divert the path of the ball and sends it soaring.  These are the simple Physics experiments that we do without thinking; and they teach us about energy and the way it works in our world.

The Butterfly Effect stretches our minds and asks us to consider that this exchange of energy takes place at far less perceptible levels as well.  We are asked to consider the idea that, through this exchange and delivery of energy, we all are connected — and that everything we do has potential for consequences that are more far-reaching that we might have imagined.  A butterfly in Brazil flaps his wing and causes a tornado in Texas?  Not single-handedly, I’m sure, but we let our thoughts expand and consider how that small bit of breeze might join with the wake of an airplane cutting through the sky, and the exhaust rising from a factory’s chimney, and the air currents in the upper atmosphere — and we begin to wonder where the threshold lies between wind and tornado, and whether that one bit of air moved by the wing of a butterfly might be the missing piece that sets the tornado spinning.

We are all connected.  If my neighbor puts chemicals on his lawn and the rain carries them downhill to my organic garden; it will no longer be organic.  If each of us cuts down a tree and doesn’t replace it, the cumulative effect could rob us of the greenhouse gases that sustain our lives.  We are all connected.  No act takes place in isolation.  Does this mean we should simply avoid acting at all?  It could give you pause to consider the far-reaching effect of every single breath you breathe; and I don’t think the idea is to stop living.  Rather, we are urged to live consciously and to avoid doing things that we know will impact our world in a negative way — even when the results will occur far beyond the limits of our own eyesight or even our own finite existence.  We all can visualize the Brazilian butterfly and the Texas tornado.  These are places we can visit and see, whether in our own travels or in photos taken by other travelers.  They provide a tangible setting for our understanding.  We all have felt the movement of air, from the most subtle breeze to gale-force winds that could carry us away; so we have a framework for understanding the continuum from butterfly to storm.

Quantum physicists are a whole different brand of troublemakers!  Paul Dirac pulls us one step farther when he says that picking a flower on Earth moves the farthest star.  We have no frame of reference for understanding particles that are as small as those at work in Dirac’s world; but once we have considered the impact of a butterfly wing, the mind doesn’t have to stretch too greatly to consider that there are forces at work that are even smaller — perhaps immeasurable by current standards — that could be the wing if the analogy were posed from the butterfly’s point of view.

I think of the energy that my own body generates.  We can’t see it, but we know that it exists.  We take in the potential energy of food, our bodies metabolize it and transform it into the energy that sustains life.  We release energy all the time in the form of the heat that is transferred from our bodies to the air around them.  We can’t see this energy, but we know that it exists.  It isn’t hard to consider at this point that perhaps the thoughts I think and the things I say carry energy as well.  We are all connected.  What I say to you might influence the way you think and feel about your world.  If you add your own contribution to the sharing of an idea and cause it to grow and gather the energy of others who agree, you can see how the first butterfly-wing of thought could soon accumulate enough force to rip through the world and cause great change.  I can only conclude that we should be careful and intentional about the things we do and the ideas we send out into our world.

If I am going to pick a flower today, it is my fervent hope that when the energy of that simple act reaches the farthest star, it will shine just a little bit brighter.