Cause and Effect

The dictionary definition of connect is to bring together or into contact so that a real or notional link is established. In the same way that animal’s diets are connected in a food web, people’s actions connect them to other people. Just as the animal might not know what the animal it ate had eaten last, a person might not know how they affect someone else. Every action a person makes produces an effect, this effect can connect them to another person. My interpretation of the quote stated by Joseph Corvelzchik, better known as the Blue Man, in The Five People You Meet in Heaven shows how the chain of events of life works. The Blue Man states this after telling Eddie the story of how Eddie had affected his death.

Eddie, as a child, runs across the street to get a ball not realizing the vehicle that had to swerve to avoid him causing the driver to die shortly after. The Blue Man teaches Eddie, “That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.” This shows how even a small thing, such as running across the road without looking for cars, can, not only affect yourself, but many other people too without you even knowing it. When Eddie asks the Blue Man what good came from his death, the Blue Man tells him it was the fact that Eddie lived. Although he did not think of the fact that he could cause someone’s death by running across the road, it was not a coincidence that Eddie ran across the road that day. Before Eddie was even born God planned for him to run across the road at that exact time of that day, he also planned for the Blue Man to die shortly after that incident and not Eddie.

In conclusion, the lesson the Blue Man teaches Eddie means, to me, that there is a chain of events in life that includes causes, the actions people take on a daily basis, and effects, which are not always revealed. When Eddie meets his first person, the Blue Man, he learns about the connections of people’s lives. If every person is connected, then every person is important.