“That wasn’t my intention.”

As I was thinking about what to write for this post, the muse popped up in front of me via a questionable news site I was perusing while eating my breakfast.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

At some point in my life lessons, filed under Learning How To Play Well With Others, it occurred to me that people (myself included) are very sloppy with their intentions.

Unless you’re a world class %$#-hole, then you don’t go through life intending to harm other people, or the environment, or whatever. You have to be a genuinely terrible person for that to be on your to-do list. In general I would say that we believe our default setting is “don’t harm”, but it’s actually a neutral setting; no actual intention at all.

So we harm.

Sometimes we have good intentions. Sometimes we want to do something nice for someone, we want to help them; it makes us feel good. Most times we do what we think will help someone else, without knowing if that would be welcome or helpful. Which means we usually fail at helping.

I had this friend Lloyd. He was my favorite curmudgeon. He and I had the same taste in towels and washcloths. Old and rough. It feels really good and scrubby, old towels absorb better and leave less lint. He had a daughter-in-law who was very concerned about appearances. She would take away his old linens and replace them with new pretty linens that he hated. My Mom came to visit, saw my towels, and bought me new towels as a gift. Those became towels I used on my dogs until they got old enough to be useful.

They both wanted to be helpful. At least my mom didn’t take my old towels like Lloyds DIL did. I have a reputation for liking nice (expensive) things. I can be a snob when it comes to certain things, I have definite opinions. But I don’t want fancy towels, don’t touch my beloved old, stringy, half bleached towels.

When we don’t do the work to find out what will actually help people, we’re almost guaranteed to miss the mark. So do the work.

But there’s a whole other territory of intentions, those neutral intentions. When we find out we’ve hurt someone, or treated them like crap, our response is often along the lines of “that wasn’t my intention”. As if that means “I didn’t try to hurt you, so I’m not wrong”.

You know what though, that’s bullshit. We don’t get to claim we did nothing wrong when we were too emotionally lazy to do something right. That’s a form of interpersonal negligence. If we want to be good people, that’s not automatic. We don’t get to claim to be good people just because we’re not sociopaths. 

So what then?

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor has this great quote from a book she wrote about her experience of suffering a stroke. This stroke left her without language for a long time. She went from being a research scientist, to someone who was severely impaired.

She noticed that she could tell what people’s intentions were by they energy they brought. She could tell if they were there to help her, or if they were going through the motions of their job. This gem of a quote is:

“You are responsible for the energy you bring.”

This means that we need to be present, aware of our energy, and have the intention to treat other people well. Coasting on neutral is not taking responsibility for the energy we bring. 

Next time you do something harmful, resist the urge to tell yourself or anyone else “that was not my intention”, because it kind of was. We either take responsibility for the impact we have, or we’ll do harm. There’s no other outcome.

*typos and grammar errors provided for your entertainment.