Plant It Anyway
The world is ending and you are holding a palm shoot. It cannot grow, nobody will eat the dates. Plant it. What that does to the logic of an action is not a small adjustment.
There is a hadith that I find harder to absorb than almost anything else in the tradition, because it refuses to make sense on the terms I usually think in.
The Prophet ﷺ said that if the Hour is about to be established and one of you has a palm shoot in his hand, and he is able to plant it before the Hour arrives, let him plant it.
Read that again slowly. The world is ending. Not declining, not in trouble, ending, imminently. The shoot will not grow. There is no time for it to grow. There will be no one to eat the dates and nowhere for the tree to stand.
Plant it anyway.
Every instinct I have been trained in says this is irrational. I have spent my working life around systems that are judged on outcomes. Did it ship. Did it hold. Did the number move. An action that cannot possibly produce a result is, in that language, waste.
And the hadith says: plant it.