I was pouring water into a glass the other day and missed. The water went sideways, over the edge, onto the counter. I stood there looking at the mess and thought, I did not intend for that to happen. But then I noticed something. I had been distracted, moving too fast, not really attending to the pouring. So in some quieter sense, I had intended exactly that outcome. I just had not been honest enough with myself to see it.
Intentions are always present. Even the ones we pretend we do not have. We tell ourselves a story, that we acted without thinking, that things just happened, that we were simply responding to circumstances. But the Tao reminds us that water always finds the lowest point, always moves according to its nature. We are not so different. We move according to something too, and that something is intention, whether it is visible to us or not.
What I notice in my work, and in my own life, is that people often make their intentions deliberately foggy. Not out of malice, but out of protection. If I do not fully know why I did something, then I cannot be held responsible when it goes wrong. And if the outcome is painful, I can stand back from it and say, I did not mean it. The intention was buried so deeply that the pain sits in me but seems to belong to nobody.
Yalom writes about the weight of responsibility, how it sits in us like an uninvited guest. Hiding our intentions is one way we try to excuse that guest from the room. But they do not leave. The regret stays. The sadness settles somewhere below the surface, unnamed, unattended. We grieve outcomes we never let ourselves fully pursue, because we never let ourselves fully intend them in the first place.
Narrative therapy asks us to look at the stories we are telling. Are they honest? Whose purposes do they serve? When we excavate our real intentions, we begin to tell a truer story. We stop performing confusion. We stop pretending we were helpless in our own lives.
Clarity of intention is not about being hard on yourself. It is about standing in your own life more fully. It is about ending the exhausting habit of not-knowing.
When you know what you truly want, you can stop lying about why you do the things you do.