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Photo: Kevin Dooley

I have found that there is a very quick path to insanity: trying to control things that you cannot control.

I was reminded of this today when I went and observed my brother's fourth-grade classroom. The fourth-graders left for math class, but when they came back an hour later, half of them were crying and the other half was either mad or kicking their backpacks. It was an emotional train wreck. When my brother asked them what was wrong, they said that they all received bad grades on their test in the previous class. My brother was trying to assure them, telling them that "your parents aren't going to ground you for a month" and "no, it doesn't mean you are going to get an F on your report card", but this had no effect. These fourth graders were convinced that the end of the world was at hand because they had a piece of paper with a number lower than a 70%. The teacher who gave them the bad grades even came back into my brother's classroom and told the students that she had decided that the assignment was just going to count as extra credit, so they didn't have to worry. But this didn't matter. They were still crushed.

My advice to my brother: control the variables you can control. You are responsible not for what happened, only with how you react, and in that moment, teaching history was not a priority.

The world is complex. There is an infinite amount of causes that are influencing an infinite amount of effects, and you will simply go crazy if you try to control all the variables in a given situation.

This was illustrated by Edward Lorenz who was studying weather patterns in the 1900s. He had an equation that was used to predict the weather, but he noticed that very minuscule changes in the initial variables caused drastic changes further in time. This was counter-intuitive because, presumably, slightly changing an initial variable should only slightly change the end result, but this was not the case. His understanding of this sensitivity to initial conditions became known as the "butterfly effect" because, "A small change such as a butterfly flapping its wings over the Pacific could cause a hurricane in the Atlantic." The ultimate conclusion of this theory: we have much less control than we would like to believe.

For humans, this is a problem, because human beings love control. We like to create things and use our intellect and will to turn our creation into something of our own choosing. We want to craft our own destiny. We often think we are in control of a situation and everything is going according to plan, and then something disastrous happens: a butterfly flaps its wings.