Last Wednesday, I was screening a movie for my elective. I more often than not skip that lecture because it stresses my brain to some extent. I had somehow discovered myself inside the lecture theater on that day, and I thank myself for this accidental participation. It was worth the time.
The movie we screened was a German thriller, Lola Rennt [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y382Z602DTw]. The movie is about a young woman, Lola, who needs to accumulate 100,000 marks in 20 minutes to save her boyfriend. She achieves this in three trials and doing so she creates three different futures for herself. Like a video game, Lola learns from her mistakes in each episode and attempts to correct them in the subsequent episode. According to the movie reality, all this is happening simultaneously, that is, the three episodes actually represent only one event. Lola appears to somehow possess an ability to manipulate time and change her fate but it’s all happening in one world. Lola keeps learning from her alternate selves and finally gets everything right to achieve what she wants.
“Butterfly effect” is the main concept of this movie. Every little thing done differently, every second saved by the central character causes drastic changes in the future events. In the third episode for example, Lola avoids causing an accident involving her father’s colleague which in turn allows him to pick up her father and results in her father’s death. Butterfly effect gives a very similar idea. It says a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. Lola was learning from each alternative episode and correcting her actions which eventually changed the future to her favor. The magic here is that all three episodes were actually happening at the same time.
To me, life looks very similar. Looking back, several years ago, I find myself in very different situations. I had made many sudden minor decisions which eventually created my present. It’s feels amazing because had I missed a single one of those decisions, the present could be very different. May be in some alternate universe, another me has done something differently and living in very different situations. But do I actually learn from the other MEs like in a video game? Sometimes, I do make intuitive decisions and miraculously many of them work out very well. Can it be that I am learning from the other MEs and doing the thing differently to get what I want? How many MEs might actually be there?
