All My Good Intentions [en]

Do you know the line? “All my good intentions don’t add up to very much…” It’s been coming and going in my mind since 1997, probably. There is a mismatch between intentions and actions. Always has been. Always will be.

The world is too small for our intentions. They’re always struggling to get out there into reality, but there is not enough space, not enough time. It’s not just me. It’s me of course. It’s some of us more than others. But it’s everywhere. In our lives, in our companies, our communities and societies. In our friendships and our governments.

It’s like inflation, in a way: if our wants and our intentions didn’t pull us onwards, beyond, further faster more, we would stagnate, or worse. We need this gap. It’s where action comes from, the desire for change and for better.

But when the gap becomes a chasm and intentions pile up in our heart right up to our throat faster than we can turn them into something real in the world, they start feeding off each other like hungry beasts and threaten to rip us open and smother our soul.

How do we set them free, all those good and worthy intentions that can’t find a place to bloom? Where can they go to find peace? I wish we had a way of letting them loose, all of us, and that I could sit on my balcony and watch them flutter across the sky like dancing clouds of coloured butterflies.