Choice

Standing at the edge of an ornamental fountain you are contemplating tossing a coin into the water. The five cent piece sits upon your thumbnail and your muscles are tensed. It would only take a single thought to set the coin spinning over and over before it falls into the water.

You are not alone. Scattered around the fountain sit, stand and lie a multitude of people, each thinking their own thoughts and veiled in their own lives. It is doubtful any of them notice you, but you pause, mentally, waiting for the right moment when no one will see what you are about to do. It is, you think, a moment that should be yours, and yours alone. So you stand, you watch and you wait. The entire visual world becomes a puzzle where, when everything slots into place, a previously hidden movement will change the picture once more.

Time passes, but not slowly, it simply moves around you. While they change, you do not. You notice them, not one by one, but as a whole. They lose individuality, but you can still tell what each part of this organic machine is doing, you can still detect some semblance of independence. In time, though, you only notice change.

It takes you surprise, then, your coin flip. One moment you are simply watching the thinning crowd, the next your eye is directed to the spinning coin as it arcs high above you before descending towards the fountain and bouncing off the iron mechanism to land in the water. The coin slides across the bowl, scraping the moss and muck in its trail, leaving a 'clean' white mark before it settles.

The moment, the point at which you chose to commit the act, seems completely involuntary, totally deterministic, yet ultimately it rested on a chain of causation started by you. How this action came to pass you will never truly know; the actual act appears to be hidden to your own, conscious, mental history. But you did do it. The how is masked and you will, forever, doubt the action as being entirely your own.
Food for thought.

--The Pope

22/01/02