A short time before my Mother died, she said that she wanted to tell me something.
"Before I met your Dad", she confided, "I was engaged to someone else. But he was killed in a motorcycle accident." Why this was preying on her mind became clear when she said, "So, you nearly had a different Dad".
That's not the case at all, of course :-). If the accident hadn't have happened, or if her fiancé had survived and they'd married as planned, I wouldn't have existed at all. To my Mother, though, my being born was a given. A 'Big Dot', so to speak, in the story of her life.
In reality, though, whatever happens in the world is an emergent property of the interweaving of myriad actions and interactions - known and unknown - that have taken place earlier and in the specifics of the present moment. That is to say, it's wiggly. And 'outcomes' are path-dependent.
This ongoing process, and everything that flows from it, is affected by the unique happenings and interactional dynamics involved in the ‘path to now’; with the latter reflected, for example, in the structures, systems, procedures, stories, rituals and routines, etc. that remain as 'imprints of the past conversations' within which these have been seeded, adopted, adapted and so on along the way. Each participant's particular ‘entry point’ into specific aspects of this ongoing patterning of interaction is also crucial to what they and others experience and what emerges for them and others overall.
Path-dependency has nothing to do with cause and effect. Or the unfolding of a pre-determined future. Whatever emerges does so as a result of the widespread interplay of people's ongoing, in-the-moment interactions. But every action, inaction and interaction, like my Mother's fiancé's accident, is path-dependent - and, to varying degrees, transformative.
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See also:: Lauren James's 'Missing Hat-trick'
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