Introduction

Lisa Coleman; that’s a story that could easily become a Shakespearean tragedy. But sometimes, we realize that the person we have been looking for was right there under our nose – or over the back fence. But sometimes, despite all of the best intentions, fate has a way of playing a cruel role.

Unlike my disastrous experience with both Karen and Janelle – caused by my impatience to start a relationship with someone, anyone after Lori left me – Lisa wasn’t a mistake; but an example of the butterfly effect. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name, coined by Edward Lorenz for the effect which had been known long before, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.

That sounds like some crazy material from some university philosophy course that I was probably fortunate to avoid; but with Lisa, how would I know that a chance childhood illness when I was eleven would have such catastrophic effects over twenty years later.

Cat Stevens, 1970