Ants, bees, fish, birds.

People.

No creature exists alone. Whether one of a group of grazing animals, or a predator following its prey, all creatures live and move in groups. Everywhere the actions of one impact others. There may be a sense of uncoordinated efforts, but even solitary animals know their place in the dance.

Randomity is the condition that no individual can anticipate in detail the actions of others. Anticipation is attention on the possible, the future. Regrets stem from errors in anticipation. Randomity makes such regrets inevitable.

Dwelling on regrets is pointless. The past exists only as remnants, memorabilia available in an ever-evolving present. The value of regrets is in their potential positive effect on future choices. When a past choice is seen as affecting a present relationship in a regrettable way, there can be hope that a future choice will repair that relationship, easing the regret.

Reparations is about making things right, not paying for mistakes but correcting them. What is important is maintaining a forward looking focus. The act of kowtow and making amends has its place, but what's done is done. One must move on.

Facing the future includes accounting for the fact of environmental turbulence. The way individuals act is often driven by an invisible hand, creating unseen incentives outside conscious control.

Rupert Sheldrake called this "the presence of the past". Nature has a built-in consistency that has a powerful influence on the way quantum possibilities are manifested. This is called entanglement. It results in a spontaneous order. Science assumes that this order is inviolable, and propounds "laws of nature" to describe it. But these laws are of necessity derived from past experience. In any present moment they would be better described as the "probabilities of nature".

Albert Einstein gave us his Theory of Relativity. It has proven to be profoundly descriptive of our physical universe, even profoundly predictive of what we will find when we look at it newly. He called the stage on which these predictions play out "Spacetime".

The Spacetime universe by implication describes the future as well as the past. But, as it turns out, this must be understood as a broad brush description. It holds up well on the scale of our everyday lives, often even explaining what we can observe of the history of the heavens. But not so well on the atomic scale.

This is because we cannot contemplate the atomic scale without considering quantum effects. And quantum effects are all about the future. They cannot be pinned down to anything more precise than probabilities.

The dawning of this understanding led to the foundation of solid state physics and the concept of semiconductors. Our whole modern technology of electronics, computers, the internet and cell phones, derives from the predictability of quantum probabilities. The assumed laws of physics said that an electron would always behave in a certain way. But these laws were found to be predictably violated by quantum effects in ways that allow electrons to occasionally move through certain materials unexpectedly. Transistors were made from these semiconductors, taking advantage of these apparently random but statistically predictable movements. Computers were then made using many tiny transistors. The resulting technological explosion was and is the foundation of much of modern history.

That merely sets the stage for what now follows.

Understanding the quantum level probabilities of nature gradually gave rise to the concept of morphogenesis, accounting for the vast variety of forms that physical objects may take. The concept of emergence then captured the sense that complex forms may have characteristics that are not predictable from the nature of their components.

One example of this is the comparison of laminar flow to turbulence. Laminar flow seems to be the simplest and most natural description of the motion of any fluid. It expects the flow to be smooth and regular, made up of smooth layers all controlled by the same forces. Turbulence is what really happens. Small disturbances grow into big disturbances, resulting in unpredictable whorls and ripples. Unexpectedly, such turbulence is often beneficial, resulting in more flow overall with less energy expended.

The origin of small disturbances that end up creating beneficial effects are probably traceable to quantum level variations. Impossible to know for sure due to their unpredictable quantum nature. But beneficial energy saving effects tend to be both stable and recurring, because once a lower energy state is achieved it is not very likely to be reversed. It's as if the universe itself favors and even advocates such stability. The orbit of a planet is one very clear example, repeated again and again at many levels.

Bringing all this home to humans, people are prone to look for cause and blame when adverse events occur. This reaction is often not productive, simply because both cause and blame are so hard to pin down definitively. They both reflect formerly possible futures now frozen into a fixed, unalterable past. So it is usually better to simply acknowledge the experience, think it through as needed, learn from it if possible, and move on. Always vowing to take the best next step available. In this way making real reparations when required.