Entanglements

Innate intelligence is not the guiding factor in many ordinary situations. Care and attention can prevent some problems with frustrating results. I think of a woman at her knitting. She is meticulous and so intense in her focus on each stitch that she doesn't notice the source of her yarn.
You have to understand how a skien of yarn is put together to fully comprehend a possible problem. A skein of yarn is wound in an alternating twist around an end left visible to the worker. When that end is pulled and used as the source of the work it continues to feed out, unwinding from the inside.
There is also the cut end of the skein visible from the outside usually hidden under a paper sleeve that identifies the type, color and manufacturer. But when the sleeve falls, or is taken off, the end becomes a free agent of sorts and normal movement of the skein might leave it dangling in the loops that are being pulled in the knitting process from the other end. As a result it is also pulled through the skein twisting as it feeds through the interior of the skein.
Whoops! The yarn is being pulled and unwound from the outside along with the intended string from the inside. So now the knitter has two strings fed into her work. This does not immediately bother the knitter. She simply uses the correct string and pushes back the other one, twisting it continuously. When the work is finished the skein is hopelessly twisted and tangled in need of much patient attention to restore it to use for another project.
What is obvious here is that a simple oversight can cause extra work and frustration later on. Much the same as a hasty word or action can escalate into an unhappy consequence in a relationship or humiliation in a social setting.
Naomi Sherer