Out of chaos, brilliant stars are born...

recently i've been doing a lot of thinking about my life and have realized that my life can very literally be described as chaotic. not in the way most people use the term, but in the very scientific form of the word. some of you may have seen the movie "the butterfly effect" and not even realized that it's based on a really, very confusing, theory of chaos.

you have to understand that history is not just a matter of dates and of places, of dusty old names in textbooks and museum vaults; it is a matter of choice, for every one of us.

every decision that we make sends a ripple of probability racing away from us, a wake of "what might have been" and "could have happened" veering away from our path, like jagged cracks in the snow pack before an icebreaker. everyone looks back on their life at one time or another and asks, "what if i had been here instead of there, if i had bet on red instead of black?" you play with these thoughts until you tire of them, but there are some thinkers who claim that for every choice we make, that the choices that we don't choose break off into their own history, isolated but somehow parallel to ours. i'm not really sure what to make of that. if every decision that we make is played out somewhere, does anything that we do really matter? you could go crazy trying to answer that question.

what i do know, what i am sure of, is that choice breeds life- and often, death. there's a line in a william shakespeare play, i forget which one it is, where someone says, "time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides." that phrase resonates in my mind. the reality is, i don't think those words are not meant to comfort, i think that they are meant as a warning.

and what i've learned from all of this, simply put, is that before a great vision can become reality there may be difficulty. before a person begins a great endeavor, they may encounter chaos. as a new plant breaks the ground with difficulty, foreshadowing the huge tree, so must we sometimes push against difficulty in bringing forth our dreams.

i wrote a poem a few weeks back during this "chaotic epiphany"... here that is:

Pathways weaving crossing and touching,
They go on for miles leading to nothing,
Searching for my own among the thousands around me,
Trying to figure out where I should be,
Remnants of a broken past,
Litter my path with shattered glass,
Each step painful and weary,
With a hope of peace nearing,
Dark and winding is the path, easy for me to stumble,
My heart needing to be loved and to be humble,
Getting lost in the eyes of others and the cares of the world,
They make their broken promises that break my soul,
Wishing for a glimmer of light in the horizon,
A hint of a promise of eternity rising,
Goals shifting from my head to my hands,
My glory, my song, has struck it's first chord,
Now, a walk, a way, a life, a real-life living sacrifice,
A new day arises leaving that breathless night,
Mine is mine, and mine is not right,
God give me the strength, a will to fight…