Understanding Chaos

[game_byrd]

Title: Understanding Chaos
Characters: Mohinder Suresh
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Word count: 325
Genre: Heroes intro-style narration
Setting: None specified
Summary: Mohinder uses his original, true power to speculate about the meaning of life.
Notes: Written for the Heroes_contest One-shot Challenge #32, “Chaos Theory”. With thanks to burnt-toast-cafe on deviantART, who had conveniently compiled all of Mohinder’s season 1 canon narrations.


Chaos. Random chance. You might think these two concepts interchangeable, synonymous, but they’re not. Random events have no connection to one another - a coin is flipped and turns up heads; flip again, and the previous result has no impact on the subsequent. The outcomes are random. Chaos has a pattern, however far-fetched or complicated it may be. All the beauty of nature, from the repeating arrangement of leaflets on a fern to the orbit of planets, is based on chaotic systems. Is it hubris to imagine we might someday be able to fathom such an elaborate structure? To do so accurately would require an omniscience previously consigned to the divine.

The tragedy of our modern civilization is that we have the capability to affect things so broadly without the capacity to predict the results. What use is free will if you do not discern the difference your actions will make on your destiny? It is predestination masquerading as freedom. Have we truly made a choice if we don’t realize what we’re choosing between?

In the face of such confusion, the eternal question will be posed again: why? Why me? Why now? What does it all mean? It is the quest to comprehend which is the highest endeavor placed before us. Without that apprehension, we are nothing but biological machines set in motion by a greater hand. We are blind to the consequences of our efforts, tossed by the whim of fate rather than charting our own course.

The struggle is no longer to be or not to be. In our world of opulence and luxury, where even bushmen may have the latest technology, where our population surges into the billions and every square inch of the Earth is claimed, ‘being’ is not the challenge. It is neither exceptional nor extraordinary. Our new struggle is to understand. Only then will we be able to look past the truly random and bring order out of chaos.