Too complicated or nonsense?

    Sometimes I can’t tell whether something is too complicated for me to understand or whether it is nonsense. There is a point where those two things begin to look remarkably similar. You listen to an idea long enough, turn it around enough times, and eventually you have to ask whether you are failing to understand it or whether there is simply nothing there to understand.
    There is one idea I have heard in different forms for years. It is difficult to explain because the moment you explain it plainly, it begins to sound mystical or something.
The idea is that two or three unrelated actions, performed over a period of time, can bring about an outcome that has no obvious connection to any of them. Not cause it exactly. That word seems wrong. The outcome manifests. It appears.
Suppose I tie my shoes every morning. I brush my teeth. I make my bed. Three completely ordinary things. None of them appears to contain anything beyond itself. Tying a shoe ties a shoe. Brushing your teeth cleans your teeth. Making a bed makes a bed.
And yet, according to this idea, under certain circumstances those three things may produce a fourth thing.
    Not because the fourth thing logically follows from them. It doesn’t. Emergent.
Perhaps I want to become better at studying. The obvious answer would be to study more, be more organized, read carefully, remove distractions. But that would not be what this is about. The three actions necessary to produce the change might apparently have nothing whatsoever to do with studying.
You perform them anyway.
    One in the morning. One later in the day. One before bed. Or perhaps all three together.(Whatever they would be, to promote whatever you were trying to accomplish ) You continue for a week, or a month, or longer. Nothing dramatic happens. Then at some point something shifts. You sit down with a book and discover that you can remain there. Your mind no longer wanders in quite the same way. Something that had previously required effort now seems almost natural.
Why?
    That is where the explanation becomes difficult.
It is not simply that doing anything repeatedly creates discipline, because apparently the actions themselves matter. You can substitute any three random behaviors and expect the same result. In the sense that the outcome seems random. There seems to be some particular relationship among them, although the relationship is invisible.
This is also where the whole thing starts sounding mystical, because perhaps it is mystical.
Three actions are performed. A fourth condition appears.
Then that fourth condition may become one of the three actions necessary for something else.
    So the process stacks.
One small sequence produces another state. That state enters a second sequence. The second sequence produces something else. After enough time, a person may find himself somewhere entirely different without being able to identify the moment when the change actually occurred.(Nothing mystical, just another part of life something one might never have thought interesting before.)
There would be no single cause.
    There would only be the arrangement. We are accustomed to thinking that an action should resemble its result. If you want knowledge, read. If you want money, work. The action and the result belong to the same visible category.
But what if some things do not work that way?
What if certain outcomes require actions that appear meaningless precisely because we cannot see the structure connecting them?
Then an ordinary act could be part of something much larger without containing any sign of it.
    You tie your shoes.
You make the bed.
You turn off a particular light before leaving the room.
Nothing happens.
You do it again tomorrow.
Nothing happens.
And then, one day, something else begins.

≽(•⩊ •マ≼I don't know. I think this is just too complicated for me to understand, I think🐾°⋆