The devil is in the detail
Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves
Big things come in small packages
The longest journey begins with one step
and so I could go on – all reminders that whilst the “big picture” is an essential view that we ignore at our peril – and indeed is fundamental to any form of systems thinking – so if we forget the details then one of them is going to sneak up and bite us – to further mix my metaphors.
So – why this subject – well it was triggered by a “short but sweet” article by Jeff Haden on Inc. which went under the title the power of small moments. The article focusses on why “every small moment for you can be a huge moment for someone else”. I want to quote one paragraph.
Now while Jeff has concentrated on the positive – we must also be aware of the opposite, negative effect of less helpful actions.
The whole subject particularly resonate with me because I can see – retrospectively (and here we go again with the understanding backwards topic of the previous post) – that as well as those big life defining moments there are plenty of small things which only needed to be changed ever so slightly to have a spectacular effect on the outcome as far as I (or someone else) was concerned – real life examples of the “butterfly effect” so beloved of chaos theorists.
The other connection with Jeff’s post and my own is that when we are at the decision point not only do we not realise the future impact, but we are probably not even aware of the importance of the moment for ourselves. Jeff uses an illustration from his own history – and that is probably all we can do – we have no inkling of the way we have affected others – only how others have affected us.
I have derived a whole lot of pleasure as a result of being a French Horn player. The sequence of events that led me to that was almost entirely out of my hands and (at least partly) resulted because of the cornet playing skills of someone else who had impressed my music teacher who, since I had a similar musical education as the cornet player, ‘assumed’ that I would make a good French Horn player.
What to me is most interesting is not so much that event, but the way that led to future things occurring – things that resulted from my horn playing – people I met – places I visited – things that I learned; I also think of others who have been ‘influenced’ – as I said before I have no way of telling how much they were influenced as that is part of their story rather than mine – people I have taught, people I have sat alongside in a horn section, and so on. Wow. All ‘because’ someone was quite good at playing a cornet over fifty years ago.
Lets make it clear here that I know that I am isolating a thread through my story for the purpose of illustrating the point. There was not just one reason for all of these things, but multiple reasons, however – it is possible that a change to that one thing would have resulted in none of the rest occurring – or at least, they would have occurred in a different way.
The question remains – is it all inevitable – if we had the capacity and the intellect to understand everything in an instant could we predict what will happen? My own take on that is NO – the physics explains a lot, and we are understanding more and more each day, each week, each year. Fundamentally though we are still free to make wrong choices – perhaps its only because our choices are always made based on incomplete information – and I also understand that some would argue that those choices were the inevitable result of what the decision make knows and therefore it is the ‘only’ choice – right or wrong does not come into it.
For me – I believe that there are things we do not understand – or even recognise the existence of – gravity existed for a long time before anyone ‘noticed’ it. So I am confident that even with all the learning that we have done there is still rather a lot we do not know. So, our decisions are not just predicated on forces and laws that we already know about – there are things that ‘allow’ us to make mistakes. Whether it be some sort of field like Sheldrake’s morphic fields or something else altogether – there are certainly things we do not understand fully about how “we” work.
Clearly I do not claim to have all the answers – actually I do not even claim to have all the questions – simply put I think that there are ‘mysteries’ yet to be solved that might rather surprise us.
So – living life forward we are – at least for the moment – constrained to be unable to predict the ‘best’ choice’ and therefore will only understand the story that we are creating for ourselves by looking back and trying to recreate the thread that links things together – inevitably we will only see where other’s stories intersect with our own and can only know other’s stories from when either we are told about them or we experience the story together.
If we can only remember a small portion of our own story – why should we expect to know more than a tiny portion of someone else’s – surely it really is the Illusion of Knowledge if we believe that we truly ‘know’ someone.