We can never, never describe all features of the total situation, not only because every situation is infinitely complex, but also because the total situation is the universe. Fortunately, we do not have to describe any situation exhaustively, because some of its features appear to be much more important than others for understanding the behavior of the various organisms within it. We never get more than a sketch of the situation, yet this is enough to show that actions (or processes) must be understood, or explained, in terms of situations just as words must be understood in the context of sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, libraries, and . . . life itself.
To sum up: just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every situation (or organism)is a process: thus the situation (or organism) is not other than its effects or actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it is or does. More precisely, the situation (or organism), including its behaviour, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment.
For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
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