The Torment of Intentions…

We have talked before of beginning to be what we want to be, and of the uneasy feelings that linger inside ourselves when we leave what we should have done not only undone, but also unstarted. We all intend well — or most of us do. We sometimes dream well. We usually hope well and wish well. We sometimes plan well, but we don’t always do what has to be done to bring our hopes and plans to the point of beginning. Sometimes we simply don’t get going. Last week we quoted some sentences on “time” from Arnold Bennett’s book of a half century or so ago. This week, from the same source, we would quote some few further sentences on “intentions”: “A man may desire to go to Mecca,” he said. “His conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, …he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring to reach Mecca… never leaves Brixton. It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left Brixton… Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to disturb the peace of the soul… There is no magic method of beginning. If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath and wanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, ‘How do I begin to jump?’ you would merely reply, ‘Just jump. Take hold of your nerves, and jump?'”¹ In all our use of time, in all our intentions, in all our wishing that we had done some things which we haven’t yet started to do, well would we remember the simple and profound fact that nothing does itself. And the person who starts to go to where he earnestly wants to go or ought to go, even if he falls far short of getting there, at least won’t be haunted by the feeling that he never started, that he never “got going.” Here are some words recently read on a chapel wall from an unknown author: “There are no limitations to what you can do, except the limitations of your own mind as to what you cannot do. Don’t think you cannot; think you can.”²