The Butterfly Effect

Hello peoples!

If you have not read my "That Boy" post yet, pause, read it, and them come back.

Okay...I think we should be good now. For those who don't know, the butterfly effect is when you look at an event, fiction or nonfiction, and change one small thing and then look at everything that one choice effects.

This morning That Boy and I were having breakfast together and talking about all sorts of things and at some point in our conversation he mentioned how at one point he had had the opportunity to test up a grade but his parents had decided it would be best if he stayed where he was. Initial though was wouldn't that have been cool if we were in the same grade. Or would it? Of course with me it couldn't stop there, so we started talking about all the implications that would have.

First just looking at when we would have met. It probably would have been in middle school, maybe through band, maybe in a different class. That Boy was in an advanced placement class called Stretch in middle school. But if we are moving him up a grade we decided he may not have made the cut for the class, and while still very smart would have also just barely missed being put in a higher level math course. It would have been 7th grade when we met since that's when I switched to public school. I didn't have high expectations from the kids around me and was often fed up with their lack of commitment to learning and rules. I was a good student, very smart, but had no patients for my peers, especially the boys. He admitted that 7th grade wasn't his best year, he hung out with kids who weren't as smart in an attempt to seem cool and he tried to fit into the popular crowd. From what he described he would be exactly like the kind of student who really ticked me off. The type that even when we got to high school I probably would never have been able to look past that terrible first impression. Knowing I probably came off a bit snobbish at times in middle school, he may not have had much of an interest in getting to know me either.

After that shocking discovery we went on to hypothesize that if we had found a way to look past middle school faults, did we have any chance of reconnecting with each other in high school. To which we quickly discovered was probably a no. Part of the reason we met is because I hung out with younger students and we were both friends with Bunny, which is how we initially met. If we never dated then we can't even be sure we would have ended up at the same college because the college we are now at may not have been on his radar.

Continuing down this rabbit hole we had another realization! He would have had a completely different friend group! I know this seems obvious but friends have a huge impact on how you grow and develop different parts of your personality. If he had taken and passed that test back in elementary school he would have met totally different people. Even at church he may not have been in the same Sunday school class as his best friend! He may have been closer to some of the older boys but it would have changed the dynamics of his church youth group a lot. His school friends would have been the people in my grade but that would have changed dynamics in the friendships those people already had too.

There are so many different ways we could take this but it didn't take to long to discover that the chances of us meeting and liking each other were slim to nonexistent. Even discovering that all the friends that shaped That Boy would be totally different, in essence changing the type of person he grew up to be. While a lot might be similar about him, he wouldn't be exactly who he is today. Even looking at how each of us has influenced the other the past two years and wondering who we would be today if that influence was gone?

I could talk forever about all the different possibilities but in the end it doesn't matter. God had a plan for each of us and how we would meet. As hard as it is some days to be a whole grade level apart, being the same grade may actually have been terrible for us. As shocking as all that was to think about, I had a lot of fun theorizing about what things might have been like. But I am so glad that everything has happened the way it was supposed to and that he never took that test.

That's my view!