# Your butterfly effect



## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

The butterfly effect is when a small seemingly unimportant action or decision leads to a significant, unexpected outcome. If you like, share your own butterfly effect(s) in this thread. I'll kick off.

Picture this. The location is Singapore, the year is 1999, the date is Monday May 3d, a public holiday. A colleague of mine and I, both having arrived in Singapore for our new job in our multinational company a month earlier, were walking along the left bank of the river to the harbour to have lunch in one of the restaurants. It was hot. Of course it was hot, it's Singapore, it's always hot. We still had about 5 minutes to walk, when I said to my colleague: "Hey, why don't we cross the river here instead of at the end, and walk through that mall in the air-conditioning". So we did, and in the mall we came across a cute little art gallery, where a female artist from Shanghai was working on a painting. We came in to have a look at the art. I bought one of her paintings, we invited her to our newly built office building to make suggestions for decorations there, and later I invited her to visit my apartment for the same purpose. There was an unmistakable click between us, we started dating and within a year we got married. Still happily married almost 22 years later. All because of one on the spot decision to cross the river one bridge earlier.


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## Chilham (Jun 18, 2020)

At the risk of turning this into a, "How I met my partner", thread your story reminded me of the series of 'butterfly' moments that led to meeting my wife.

I was working in an office in London. I applied and was offered a job out of town, subject to references and medical. I tendered my notice but failed the medical as my eldest brother had been diagnosed with a heart attack at 31-years old. It transpired a few years later that he hadn't had a heart attack, but had a viral infection that caused an arrhythmia.

My employer agreed to rescind my notice, subject to a medical in Harley Street that I passed, but had already started to interview for my replacement. They decided to recruit one of the applicants anyway and a few weeks later in walks the love of my life to the office! 

We'll have been married 40-years in July thanks to a misdiagnosis of my brothers heart condition, the cautiousness of the doctor on my first medical, and a decision by my boss to recruit an additional person. If any one of those had not happened, we'd not have met.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

I really would not mind if this turned into a how I met my partner thread (always fun to read those), but there must be other possibilities (for instance, small things resulting in landing a job, missing an accident, and so on....). Yours is a nice butterfly effect example as well.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Yet another how I met my wife moment: When I was a young man, I would go to an elderly friend's house every week and mow her lawn, and she would repay me by inviting me in and sharing something she baked and regaling me with stories of her past. At the same time a lovely young lady would come by every week and help her with housecleaning. 

I had been dating the wrong girl for some time, and I finally broke it off. The next week when I came to mow, she said about her young friend, "I have two words for Teresa: None finer." 

It turns out that she was right. We have been together ever since, and all because we just wanted to help out someone in need.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

We had been vaguely talking of 'Taggart' returning to the piano when he retired but we had no piano in the house and no firm plans. 

One day, a week after Taggart retired, we were out shopping in Great Yarmouth (we lived in Norfolk at the time) and we decided to walk back to our car via the bus station. We saw a music shop there - something we hadn't known to exist. So we went in, and came out having bought a second-hand piano and ordered a stool to go with it. On impulse and by accident. 

Taggart asked a music colleague at the college he'd just retired from for a piano teacher's address and he started back a few weeks later. After that he was on at me to return to the violin, but I knew that if I took it up, it would become an obsession and take over my life, so I resisted. 

A year later - near Christmas - Taggart rang the music shop and discovered that they had just got in a new consignment of starter-pack violins (what are often called 'violin shaped objects') from China. So we went in and it so happened that a luthier had just started work there and he was a folk enthusiast. He said he would restring the violin that we'd been persuaded to buy and put a new bridge on to adapt it for playing folk. We went to pick it up on Christmas Eve. The luthier wouldn't allow me to try the fiddle in the shop, but it was so cheap that I thought however bad it was it was worth it to try tunes out on. 

We got it home - I tried it - and it sounded not-half-bad. A year later I bought a more expensive violin which sounds good, but my original fiddle, having been played on so much, can sound just as good if not better when I'm at a session. 

So that was it, on Christmas Eve 2012 - the fiddle took over my life, just as I'd predicted.


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