177. Action And Description

When you do something you’ve done thousands of times before, you do it without thinking. Your past experience of doing the same actions over and over has accumulated into a kind of memory that does not require conscious thought.

If someone comes along and asks you how to do what you’re doing, you might be able to come up with a list of actions they should follow. But when you do the thing, you do not follow this list or any list at all. Nothing like this is necessary for you to access your understanding of how to do it. For you, the next action in the sequence simply arrives when it must.

When the person who asked you for directions does not obtain the same result as you do, you might want to tell them that they haven’t followed your directions correctly. In some cases this will be true, but more often the discrepancy arises because there was something you unknowingly left out of your directions. It’s this extra piece that makes the difference between a good result and a mediocre one.

Through careful questioning and training, you might eventually be able to get the other person to understand the missing piece. But it’s also possible that you might not be able to locate the words to describe it. Finding yourself at such a loss demonstrates that your directions are an explanation after the fact, and they are not what you actually do.

The language describing your actions is never the same as the actions themselves. It is a representation and like all representations it is not the thing-in-itself. To be aware of this is to understand that there is always something that is not captured by language. It is to be reminded that there is no replacement for experience and the awareness it provides.