the fall and causality

I think we're obsessed with causality.

We see. We hear. We taste. We touch. We smell.

We experience.

Then we evaluate our experience; we judge.

Good or bad? Right or wrong? Happy or sad? Beneficial or detrimental? Useful or useless? Relevant or irrelevant? Classy or base? Accurate or inaccurate? Valuable or worthless? Intended or unintended?

After we're satisfied with our appraisal, we take our neatly quantified, rationalized, categorized, color-coded slips of paper and pin it onto a large, fabric-covered wall. It's the wall of "reactions," even if we don't realized its title.

Then comes the string.

The string is the fun part, at least for some. It links the individual experiences together. The good with the good. The bad with the bad. The good with the bad. Strings cross everywhere and weave in, out, over, and under themselves and each other.

We try to make sense of the tangled mess that we've created. We look for patterns and we rearrange strings. We move paper, and cross out words, and recategorize the words that remain, and add more slips and remove more slips, and broadcast our vague sense of the picture to everyone who will listen.

We convince ourselves of action leading to reaction, cause leading to effect, butterflies leading to tsunamis.

And while we continuously revise, rename, and re-edit our wall, it never fully comes together. Sometimes we start to trust it to lead us to where we think we want to go, this map we've designed. Sometimes we begin to rely on it to house and protect us, this blueprint we've sketched out.

Do we, also, sometimes, maybe, sorta, kinda force a version of reality to fit into our painting instead of striving for our painting to reflect reality instead?

Did we ever consider that, sometimes. there are no strings attached?

Could it be that some of this is the fault of a tree, in a garden, long ago?