Yesterday, I was sitting at Java, doing work on my PMI Presentation for later this month. I saw Audrey, a woman I met late last month, come through the door. Audrey is pursuing her RN, and I’ve run into her studying once or twice. I was speaking her, and asked her what she was studying. Audrey responded with “oncology.” That took me in a new direction, and I asked her where they were finding causes for cancer. Largely, to fix a problem, one needs to find its causation. Of course, the second I asked her this, I thought and quickly changed my perspective. “Causes of cancer are like the weather, aren’t they? The systems are so complex and multi-dimensional, predicting cancer in someone is like predicting the weather a year later.” The point is to say that, like the weather, there are no linear causes for things that happen with our bodies. If there is one thing running has taught me, there is nothing so easily reduced to linear causation.
Our human minds, while incredibly intelligent, always strive to find linearity to things, when they are so much more complex and multi-dimensional than that. Quite simply, our systems are so dynamic, both with the economy, politics, weather, our bodies, etc… is there ever a way to understand root causation to such components? I am sure “Tipping Point,” by Malcolm Gladwell probably discusses this—I haven’t yet read that book. Ultimately, as we exist over expanses of time, like a Universal Field Theory for the Universe’s physics, perhaps such things we are never to know or fully understand. However, it is quite amazing, and always something to keep us continuing to try to figure it out.
Of course, as I type this, I am beckoned to Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, by Aristotle. If you’ve not read it, or don’t have the time, look it up sometime on Wikipedia. It’s tough to get around unity and oneness. What a wonder it is in which we exist.
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