4:05pm Thursday September 20, 2013. The Mill Coffeehouse in Lincoln, NE.
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I guess this means that intentions are worth very little in the grand scope of value - that a person can do horrific things and at the same time have the best of intentions. I've spent a lot of time thinking about intentions, especially in the past few years - young adulthood (whatever that means... See my blog "On Coming of Age") seems to be a time where one starts to become expressly aware of how the way that they live affects the people around them. At this time you learn about living amicably with people who aren't your family, about what can be acceptable in romance, and about what allows a person to maintain substantive friendships. I guess this too is part of "growing up" but it also seems to have significant bearing on the value of intentions as well. Don't we all go into life with the best intentions?
It's probably safe to say that occasionally we are overtly selfish, angry, poorly intentioned individuals. However, most of the time I think we want to do what's right, what's good and what makes us into socially acceptable people (granted, the specifics of these things is a bit hazy, nonetheless it is what we aim for). Or at least I think it is what we aim for, I think it's what I aim for. Yet, we can still cause a good deal of harm despite those good intentions. Then, as if the issue wasn't complex enough, we can do kind, generous, loving and all around good things for terrible, selfish and twisted reasons. And, if theres no connection between the goodness of our thoughts and the goodness of our actions, where exactly do we get our moral structure from at all? Given the lack of connection between good intentions and good actions it becomes easy to dismiss the value of intentions altogether... or just remain confused.
Now, before your brain implodes (welcome to the inside of my head 24/7) let me just pull it back a little. I started thinking about this topic recently because I heard Willie Nelson's version of "You We're Always On My Mind" come on the radio. The basic gist, incase you have lived under a rock since the song became a hit in the 1980s, is that there's this guy who loves this girl and he's sorry because for a long time he neglected her even though he was always thinking of her and he loved her very much. The guy is looking back and realizing how much he wronged this woman and at the same time the whole point of the song seems to be this idea: the fact that she was always on his mind makes it sort of okay that he spent so many years being an ass... It's a little odd right?
What if he had spent his whole life caring for the woman and giving up things he wanted so that he could be with her but then wrote a song about it called "being a rockstar instead of your partner was always on my mind," it's weird right? In one case he seems like a better man for his good intentions despite his bad actions and in the other case he seems like a worse man for his bad intentions despite his good actions.
When I first heard the song I felt sympathy for the man, we all make mistakes, and it's not like he didn't love her. He just screwed up, and now he's just admitting he screwed up. Haven't we all done this, don't we want it to matter? Is that why we ask questions like, what was his motive? And what the hell were you thinking? Because on some level we need our thoughts and actions to be reconciled. On some level it matters. It's easy to say intentions don't matter, or to deduct that, in the case of "You Were Always On My Mind, she was actually very rarely or never on his mind and he's just lying about his intentions. However, these answers are, in my opinion, the poor man's way out. The connection between thoughts and actions matters, and there are situations where it's confusing.
And now, I hope you weren't expecting an answer to the question of why intentions matter while, when I began writing this article I certainly intended to give you one, I realize now that I have not and also cannot.
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