There is something in all of us that loves to put together a puzzle, that loves to see the image of the whole emerge. It is interesting that the words “whole” and “health” come from the same root (the Old English hal, as in “hale and hearty”). So it should come as no surprise that the unhealthiness of our world today is in direct proportion to our inability to see it as a whole. What we see depends on what we are prepared to see. Western languages, with their subject-verb-object structure, are biased toward a linear view.

– Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of Systems Thinking