Living with intention

On having both: the rest and the productivity, the grounding and the flying, the gratitude and the anticipation

This is the year that I’ll do it:

living with intention.

Things have been coming to a head for a while now. I’d felt the change building like the rising swell of a tidal wave beneath the boat.

And the word I kept coming back to, again and again, was intention.

Intention is the spark. Intention is the fireflies in the dark to light the way. Intention is the gorgeously dew-dropped tendrils of morning web delicately connecting everything. Intention is the gold-limned cracks of kintsuji holding the imperfect cup together.

For a while now I’ve known: I want to wake up early and enjoy my mornings, and I want to achieve something in the afternoons. I want rest so deep and restorative that it’s like sinking into a bath, and I want the electricity of chasing after something new and unknowable.

For a while I was only living one way, like using only the left-side of my brain. I single-mindedly chased a dream and it fell apart. In the rubble of my broken pieces I asked what it was all for, when it had all been for success.

I lived here but I was always looking for there. Half-in and half-out of this city that I wasn’t in love with, mind constantly roaming the globe (and the internet) for the true place I could call home.

Hiking the gorgeous hillsides of northern Spain while gritting my teeth with a busted knee and numerous blisters, because I’d fooled myself into thinking that the finish line was more important than the trail getting me there.

And I kept noticing. That I was in March thinking about May. That I was in Dublin thinking about Valencia. That I was writing a book thinking about telling people I’d finally finished it, and that it’s getting published (it didn’t). That I was in a city full of people thinking about the community I’d build in the next city full of people I moved to. That I felt overwhelmed with each first step on a freelance project/idea because I was thinking about how impossible it seemed to make a living off of it.

That I kept saying to myself I’d be happy when.

Luckily life wasn’t all work and no play, but even then the present had no framework. I enjoyed things, whether that be good food or the sunlight or my partner’s company. I laughed at things. I rested. I chased one novelty to the next.

But I never felt gratitude. And I do mean feel–springing up unbidden without being manufactured into being. I did the gratitude exercises like a checklist, a logical fact that never penetrated to my heart. I never savored. I never let simple pleasures or amazing experiences or deep connections with people absorb into the skin of my soul like lotion. They remained surface-light.

I don’t mean that I wanted intensity. Far from it–I don’t believe that intensity equals realness anymore. But I felt like these experiences bounced off me like a ray of light hitting a mirror, and I bounced lightly from one moment to the next so that, at times, when someone asked–How was your week? How was your weekend? It genuinely took me a few seconds to even remember what had happened.

I wanted to remember. And I wanted it to stay. I wanted to notice.

Why wasn’t I noticing? I kept noticing that I was not noticing.

I wanted to be present with life. I wanted to be hand-in-hand with it instead of being led on a leash by the inexorable march of time while my gaze was stuck to a screen.

I was always switching from one autopilot mode to the next. I was either grinding on autopilot, or I rested on autopilot. I reacted to things instead of agentically doing things; I woke up because of an alarm. I worked because it was 9am. I stopped because it was 5pm. I saw a friend because it was the weekend.

So the days added up like beads on a string and the life I wanted started to stack up in my mind. I didn’t want to live ambitiously for the future anymore, but I didn’t want to wile away my days doing nothing, either. I didn’t want to live so slowly that I didn’t want anything anymore, but neither did I want to pursue them so relentlessly that I blew past all inner and external boundaries like I had before.

And that’s when I stumbled on intention.

Intention has the space to hold all of those things at the same time.

I want to be rooted and on fire.

I want to live deep and high.

I want a slow life and an ambitious one. Not so ambitious that I can’t live slowly, and not so slowly that I achieve nothing.

I want to move through life seeing and being and participating, not on autopilot.

Intention encapsulates the present and the future for me. It holds the small, everyday things and the big picture, too. I no longer want to forget myself by letting the former erase the latter. I knew that external success isn’t the only form of success. And yet, when I was chasing my dream, I forgot that. I knew that I’m lucky to own and live in a house that keeps me out of the rain, that my partner and I can fill with our laughter and the scent of dinner cooking. And yet, when I wash dishes, I forget that. I know that there’s a whole wide world out there with so many things to do, see, explore, and learn. And yet when I sit down to watch TV, I forget that.

I know that I want to value friends and family. And yet, when I think of all the things I have to do and get done that day, I forget that.

It was always only having one piece of the whole. Like I’d shattered the circle and I only held up one jagged piece at a time.

Intention, to me, is the opposite of forgetting. Intention is remembering. Intention is being expansive enough to keep dozens of colors on the palette for a more full-bodied portrait, instead of using only one or two.

Intention isn’t living with purpose, though that can be a part of it (but not the whole; never the whole).

Rather, it’s living on purpose.

You can do anything–rest, drive, scroll, play–as long as you do it on purpose. With intention. With a conscious decision to do so, fully aware and present. With all the values you hold still in place. With knowing where it fits into the larger frame of life, and acting accordingly.

With intention, I want to wake up because I am awake and I am a living being. I work because I choose to do it, or because the work sets my soul on fire, or because I find value in the task. I see a friend because our conversations light me up and I genuinely want to see them. I feel gratitude because I’ve lived slowly and meaningfully enough to have it well up like an overfed spring.

And that’s why the word intention became so powerful to me.

It’s remembering who I am, it’s knowing what my values are–and aligning my life to them. In this moment, and the next, and all the moments afterwards.

And what better time to start than now?