Sample Essay: Can We Cheat Life?

After reading watching a film by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber called The Butterfly Effect once more I went to smoke my usual cigarette before sleep and suddenly discovered a new side of this film. For those who didn’t see the film I can say in few words its main idea. The main character got an ability to go back to past and to change some episodes of his life. And every time he changed a little episode his whole life took a completely different direction. It reflects the main idea of Chaos Theory which states that even a light move of butterfly wing in one part of the world can cause a destructive hurricane in another part of the world (Edward N. Lorenz).  I think it means that all events in our world are connected and every event causes a chain of other events. It’s an interesting theory and I seem to believe it but my essay is not about this. In that film the man got a chance to correct his mistakes made in past to improve his current life. And this is a dream of any person. Some of you can say that you are never sorry for your mistakes but it’s not true. Instead of declaring this life position which seems to sound cool, you’d better look deeper inside of yourself and find out if it’s really true. Everyone is sorry for some deeds. If you are not than these deeds are waiting for you in future. Anyway earlier or later everyone wants to correct some mistakes. But unlike the situation in film we don’t have such ability. We often compare our life with writing a dairy. I want to make this comparison more precise – we write a dairy but we don’t have an eraser… After making a mistake we can write that there is a mistake. We can even write the right variant after that. But the mistake will still be there.

You can ask what it is all about, why I’m saying all that. My point is that one should do everything right the first time. Every time I make choices I weight all “for” and “against”. Then I do it once more. And only then I make a decision. You can call me too careful but life gave me a lesson that taught me to do so. I don’t want to burn my fingers once more. Two years ago I clearly realized that life isn’t a game. You can’t “save” at some point and then start over. For some people it’s a problem to realize that. Especially for those who spend much time playing videogames. For these people the boundary between virtual world and reality is washed out. Some of them make fatal mistakes like shooting classmates and teachers from a gun. It happens because the illusion that one can go several steps back without any consequences became a part of human consciousness. But that’s only an illusion. The reality is that I, you, all of us have only one chance to make the choice. And we should make it wisely.

I don’t know why I became so excited about all this. Maybe because the philosophy of do everything right (= best) the first time was violated by the idea of the film I discovered an hour ago… I don’t know… But now I calmed down and here what I can say about all this: we all are human and can’t completely avoid mistakes and we must realize it. But we also must clearly realize that every step we make in life points the direction from where the next step will be made. That’s why think of every step before making it. And remember – we don’t have an eraser…