God of Small Affairs (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780578568430)

Time is made out of threads. Pull one and someplace somewhere things unravel. We know how to pull on the right thread because we see the whole tapestry of life's possibilities. That's why we are so good at finding a good path into a future. I say a future because there is no such thing as the future.

We are made of time threads--thick bundles of knots that can pull and twist and change the course of history. It's all about connections--pull one strand, and the others twist with it. Like Newton's second law, for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction. But we are small in relation to civilized time, planetary time, cosmological time. To make a big change requires a course correction many many years prior. Like if you want to deflect a meteor hurtling toward Earth, you need to change its course far out in space where just a nudge would do it. To make a course correction close to the impact event, a lot of energy is required. Same with history...

So we are great at little things, at manipulating tiny threads of life. We are the gods of small affairs...until we are not.