Raise your hand. Before and during the movement, distributed motor systems prepare and execute action; prediction and sensory feedback help shape the sense that the movement is yours. An intention is not a weightless object that shoves physics from outside—it is one name for part of an embodied process. Yet describing the mechanism need not erase the lived threshold between waiting and doing. Where, in that unfolding chain, does the act begin?

Agency is not a binary choice between gripping total control and watching a passive theatre. Actions have intended, unintended, shared, and resisted consequences. Research also distinguishes the felt sense of agency from objective control; the two can diverge. A spoken word moves air and can alter a relationship, but what follows depends on other people and conditions no speaker commands. How much of an act belongs to the intention, and how much to the world that answers it?

Agency is not total responsibility for whatever happens. Coercion, illness, trauma, disability, inequality, and chance can narrow or remove meaningful options; being harmed is not a failure to act. Philosophies of free will disagree about the control required for responsibility, while social research examines how structures constrain and enable action. Within those limits, agency can still matter. The honest question is not "Why didn't you control everything?" but "What was genuinely yours to do?"