Thinking Forward

 The entire scientific idea of "looking for a cause" is so antithetical to a lot of what I am reading in Chan Buddhism. And I do wonder if perhaps the academic world is catching up to the idea that the world is not driven by single causes, but by a whole vast array of interrelated variables which is referred to as causes and conditions.
  When planning things, one is often under one impression about how it's going to go, not realizing that the plan only exists in that single moment or span of time. We have such an example at work, where the system's database is not functioning the way anyone could have imagined in the beginning. Yet, lacking in any prior knowledge or information, we sketch an outline of what we think things might look like. In almost all situations, what a person can create in a moment cannot capture all the scenarios of what could happen later.
   If a person recognizes that plans are only hypothetical and tentative (in fact, similar to experiments), then there is no strict blueprint for how a person should feel or think. In fact, like any form of research, what a person plans is only a guess as to what could happen. If I am approaching plans from the perspective of what outcomes I want to arise, I had been leave a sufficient margin for things to be somewhat different. This is because the conditions in which I formulate a plan are always limited to the information and experience I have in that moment.