Choosing One Thing, Doing Another

A doctor tells a child:

"Do not touch the wound."

The child understands.

Maybe even agrees.

Later, while playing, the child pretends that one hand is a spider crawling up the other arm.

The spider moves.

Up the wrist.

Up the forearm.

And then the hand touches the wound.

The child did not choose to touch it. The wound may not even have been present in attention. What the child was doing was making a spider crawl up an arm.

Yet touching the wound was also something the child did.

Suppose someone asks you to hold up a number with one hand.

But instead of choosing a number, you decide to choose randomly among familiar hand signs. The horns, the victory sign, the OK sign, or a fist.

Only afterwards do you look at how many fingers are extended.

Maybe you did not know the number before looking.

You chose the sign. Yet by choosing it, you also produced a number.

The number was your doing, but it was not what you actually chose.

What we do can extend beyond what we chose to do.

We may do one thing and thereby do another.