The impact of a fraction of a second

It's astonishing how a single second, a tiny revelation, an insight in a fraction of a second can change everything. How something huge can happen in one tiny moment can impact your entire life, or more than just yours, forever. And just like that, with the force of that impact, nothing is ever the same again.

It makes my head whirl to think of all the different ways that every particular incident could have gone. Of all the situations that work in my favour, or not in my favour, just out of luck.

Probably the most obvious example for this is the lottery; think of the man who wins enough money to change his life, even the life of his kids and grandkids, by sheer luck? Anything, anything different from how it was at that particular time, would have resulted in his life being perfectly the same, and he wouldn't have even known.

Victims of a bomb blast. They probably rethink a million times how their life would have been absolutely unperturbed, had any single thing been different. If they hadn't stepped into that shop at just that particular time; if only they'd gotten out five minutes earlier. If only they had followed their plan, and not taken a slight deviation, maybe they wouldn't have been put on the spot. Maybe their entire life would have been different.

My grandpa was on a bus, coming home from work one evening. The driver was going too fast, he was going to run into another bus ahead of them, so he slammed down hard on the brakes, and that's all it took to change my grandpa's life; a passenger whose name the driver probably never knew. He had a serious disc compression in his backbone, and one surgery led to another. It was never the same again, not for him or his kids.

I find it a little difficult to live in a world where every small thing has unmeasurable impact, beyond its original size. I can't deal with the fact that miniscule things can ripple out of proportion. I cannot even begin to say how unfair that is. People say, "Who said that life is fair?" But it stuns me that they can make a statement with so much gravity, so lightly, like it hardly matters at all.

But who am I, or any of us, to question the way things work?

So I guess the best we can do is take what we're given and be thankful for all the tiny things rippling out of proportion, to impact us largely in our favour. Since the goal is to keep ourselves happy, we should answer our big questions with whatever helps us sleep at night. My biggest advice on that front, is to never, ever ask what would have happened.

This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.