Cause and Effect

Today, I turn 27. And everything has a cause and effect.

2 years ago, I started grad school. Since then, I've co-founded a startup helping people in Africa, traveled to India, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, and will be embarking on another life-changing journey to Jerusalem in 2 days, and am pursuing 2 Master's degrees. Everything has a cause and effect.

About a year ago, I switched from a church in a very wealthy suburb of Boston full of educated and talented individuals to one located in the heart of Cambridge passionate about social justice and racial reconciliation. Everything has a cause and effect.

Relationships, something that I thought I had figured out and was set on, have brought me deep emotions, both hurt and joy. Everything has a cause and effect.

Something I have learned over the past couple years, largely influenced by grad school, is that no one result is caused by a single variable. Everything stems from a number of variables, and there are usually many causal linkages. Everything is part of a system, a group of elements that are connected or related in some way. These can be physical (an ecosystem, a transportation system), conceptual (the Metric System, a betting system), even combinations (a nation's justice system, a traffic system). But all are functional, or they would not be identified as systems, i.e. a system is worth thinking about only if the behavior of the collective is more meaningful than that of its components.

Everyone is familiar with systems. Consciously and without realizing it, people regularly ascribe to all kinds of systems and interpret them accordingly. But if this is so, we must be pretty good at it, right? Do we need training in what many call "systems thinking"? Yes, because there is a large class of systems we have trouble understanding. We label these systems "complex," and resign ourselves to only the most cursory explanations of their behavior. A good example is weather prediction. What will be the high temperature on March 11, 2004? We can predict exactly how far away the Earth will be from the Sun on that day? but not (reliably) whether it will rain.

According to Wikipedia, systems thinking is:

...the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole. In nature systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plant and animals work together to survive or perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization healthy or unhealthy.

Systems thinking is an approach to problem solving, by viewing problems as parts of an overall system, rather than reacting to specific part, outcomes or events and potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences. Systems thinking is a framework based on the belief that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation. Systems thinking focuses on a cyclical rather than a linear cause and effect.

Everything has a cause and effect. And my current state is but only a snapshot of a dynamic interweaving of many elements and components, all interacting in a complex manner. Who knows what the state will be like tomorrow.