Maybe it’s much too early in the year, but I thought I’d ask you just the same: how much thought do you give to intention in everything you do? I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the past few weeks, in large part because the holiday break gave me an opportunity to stop, take stock, and realize just how much of what I’d been doing what more reactive than fully intentional on my part.
What started me on this train of thought was thinking about certain processes and traditions in work that had essentially evolved by themselves without any of us really fully intending for them to happen — and, in the same frame of mind, noting that certain plans we had made had come to nothing because, again, things had happened that we hadn’t really intended that pulled our attention away at the wrong moment. But it’s not only a work thing; I’ve noticed it in other areas of my life, and even here: things I fell into doing without even noticing, and then after months going, “when did that become a thing?”
(If you don’t know what, I’m not going to show myself up and reveal all.)
Upon realizing this — and, bear in mind, I did so as the year started and thoughts of “resolutions” were in the air, as pointless as that tradition might ultimately be — I told myself that I would at least attempt to be more conscious of what I was doing, and have more actual decision-making going on inside before things happened. Of course, that’s one of those things where the theory and the reality are two drastically different things: as soon as I had to start interacting with the rest of the world, that theory was tested and a lot of purely reactive activity started back up because, turns out, other people have their own opinions, wants, and needs, it seems…?
What’s left, then, is the desire to do better and the hope that doing so will get easier with practice as the year goes forward. That, or I just forget about it entirely again by April or something.
