“God damn these cretins” I’d repeat whilst ticking,rocking back and forth and scribbling notes on the papers of my first year students. It was always the shift from one in morning to three in the morning which I hated the most, the damp and cold started setting in and as it grew earlier (or later) the birds began to herald the start of another grueling day of belligerence and pedagogical irreverence and I, well I was staring at their brash and nigh on ethereal-stupidity.
Yes that was my life - and as bad as it sounds I’d have never have come out of alive if it were not for the choices I’d made along the way. Perhaps that’s a touch dramatic, I’d never be sitting here in Johannesburg, engaged to the kick ass, rebellious-beautiful-intellectual-artist-poet Talita and driving a car made for two, working for the company I do…and so on and so forth.
We can blame ‘causality‘, or as some call it “The Butterfly Effect”, for that, causality is defined as being :
Causality denotes a necessary relationship between one event (called cause) and another event (called effect) which is the direct consequence (result) of the first.[1]
If you were as smart as say Talita, you would have seen a fatal flaw in my use of the term ‘Causality‘ for it postulates that for occurrence x to have existed, and for ‘causality‘ to exist, occurrence y must have caused x’s appearance - not quite what I picture is a chain of related events now is it. BRAIN ANEURYSM! For example, I’m sitting on my couch enjoying a tasty beverage right this very second, an act which is directly related to my preceding choice - set, move to car, drive to shop, purchase beverage, return home and sit on couch. Such a cycle of past iterations of my bodily movements would have resulted in all of those decisions which preceded me sipping this here tasty juice.
Now to apply this rather unsound theoretical example and my personal interpretation of its principles to my life before my understanding of who I am dissipates!
For starters, imagine I had the power to alter just one of the many millions of decisions I’ve made in the past seven years. I’ve been offered many “choose your own adventure” type cross-roads, I shall use but one of them to explore this oft bandied about term causality and shall utilize it to explain that causal chains predictate the chaos which shall no doubt ensue in your life, tomorrow.
Vincent :
We shall start off where I left off, I was sitting marking my final paper, when a young girl rudely entered my chamber without so much as a knock. She pranced up to me, the glint of ignorance bouncing off of her glazed over retina, and sniffed. I’ve not figured out the appropriate use of the keyboard to do justice to the form of onomatopoeia it might require to describe to you just what a sniff she performed. Needless to say, I was stressed and she was hideous to me, nay dead to me, and my mind snapped. It snapped with such force that my hands shout out in front of me, my knuckles grabbed the desk before me and I leapt up like a god damned cobra ready to strike the eyes of a National Geographic Adventurer. I snarled “what in the flying fuck was that!”. She just stared. “GET OUT”, I bellowed, whilst tearing up her now defunct and useless exam paper which had the blood of my red pen coagulating on it. It was at that very moment that I realized I wasn’t alone in the room, and so I did what any maddened deranged Vincent might, gave them all a snarl and walked out.
Narrator :
As Vincent snarled, Kafka’s divine cockroach appeared from the sky in a cloud of smoke. Coughing and spluttering as it landed, the divine cockroach, hissed “Vincent, for your act of bravery and kindness - for which you shall receive no earthly reward - I give you the choice to a) Kill the sniffing person and remain an academic forever or b) Walk out of your chamber and follow your dream to Johannesburg, whereupon you shall be met by Talita. Vincent wisely selected (c) an option not handed to him but most appropriate. Rip paper, snarl at foolish infidel and grimace as he ground his teeth whilst forcing just one last academic breath from his cold lips “oh you fucking idiot, I cannot take this anymore”.
Even at this juncture I’m asking myself, “what was the point of that witty yet irrelevant anecdote”? To answer, the point I make is that, had all of those nigh on imperceivable events not occured, the girl sniffing, the last paper in the pile waiting for me to mark, my way with profane-words, the drinks I had two years earlier with a good friend debating the pro’s and con’s of tutoring and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, this blog would never have been completed, and I, well I’d probably be an even angrier man than I am today. Science can be fine, right?
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