The Inscrutable Nature of Consequences.

I read a post on somebody’s blog the other day, to the effect that one of the ten things she most wanted to do was ‘change somebody’s life irrevocably.’ I felt obliged to comment: ‘Do you really want the responsibility of altering somebody’s life path, since you have no idea where it will lead?’

 

So then I began to wonder whether anything I said on my blog might have the same effect, and I asked myself whether I had the right to do that. There’s no problem, of course, since all I’m doing is telling tales and offering opinions. I’m not consciously trying to change somebody’s life path to serve my own ends. A person reading anything I or anybody else has to say is free to ignore it. This kind of interaction is a routine part of life, communication and learning. 

There’s still a question to be considered, though. Let’s take a plausible scenario.

 

A mother sees her young child toddling towards a busy main road. What does she do? Makes haste to prevent the child reaching the road, obviously. But let’s suppose the child was then involved in a horrific accident the next day, something the mother was powerless to prevent. As a result, the child ends up permanently crippled or worse. OK, wind the clock back. The mother fails to see the child heading for the road, or arrives too late to prevent a relatively minor brush with a car. The child is taken to hospital and kept in overnight and through the next day for observation, but has suffered only a little bruising. Because she was in a different place on the second day, she avoids the second accident and goes on to have a long, healthy life.

 

Was the mother wrong to prevent the child walking onto the road? Of course not. She acted on instinct and in accordance with the best knowledge available. Nobody would seriously expect a mother to allow her child onto a busy road. But the inscrutable nature of cause and effect should still make us wary of consciously changing somebody’s life path, because we really don’t know what consequences might accrue somewhere down the line.