Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century French writers have emphasized that most virtue or evil plays out in larger than life consequences. To a Balzac or a Flaubert, there were never any separated events. If Madame Bovary chose adultery, life-shaping contingent events and patterns would follow. Hamlet turned out to be indecisive, over-contemplative, frozen to act. Like Ahab in Moby Dick, we must learn that it is all right to be passionate, but not obsessive.
Organizational events combine and recombine as well.
However, the boundaries, invisible as they are, reveal themselves, as events careen off the outer edges of a world. I am a pushover for such elegant allusions as the new science theorists would have us embrace. Our Cartesian-trained minds do not allow us to see the patterns, while we tack a sailboat. The shore is evident, but it only appears nearer after a time. So too, we must see the pattern, over the event.