‘Do nothing without intention’

To embrace acting with intention is to move towards a higher state of consciousness. You no longer do something just because you are programmed to. Instead, the action arises from your will

Some songs stay with you. Maybe because you’ve listened to an album so often the riffs have taken root in your brain and can be summoned without your conscious knowledge. Sometimes a random tune draws you into another and before you know it your mind is a jukebox. Sometimes parts of a song come back to haunt you, and I like to entertain them, because in doing so, you are still listening, in a way, to the music. Recently, this little interlude in Solange’s album When I Get Home has been returning to me. I read, today, that it’s taken from a video by a YouTube spiritualist, Lula Belle. It says, ‘Do nothing without intention.’ It’s that simple. In fact, I gifted the phrase to my students at the end of the last workshop I taught. I told them that if there was one guiding principle they could adopt as part of their daily academic practice, it was this.

I find the advice so loaded, because the word intention has been consistently associated with the process of art making. You are told by the powers that be that art is about intention. An art object presumably exists because someone intended for it to come into being, or someone intended for it to assume a certain shape and form. When I argue that many housewives historically functioned as artists, I do refer to similar logic. But I am still theorising on what it means to ‘do nothing without intention’. It obviously implies that there must be a large degree of premeditation about singular acts. To do is to act or to take action. To introduce intentionality towards an action means that it must be the consequence of rigorous thinking. It is not easy to produce an intention. It is rarely automatic. If there seems at all like there is a fluidity to a series of action, it will have been the result of practice. For example, I’ve often observed my partner’s aunt Maridl in her kitchen, making a cake or a strudel. There is a way in which she minimises waste that attests to a learned frugality. If she whips cream, she will transport it into whatever requires it by using a ladle to get all of it out. If anything remains she licks it before putting it into the sink. She recycles, too, with this focussed attention on first reusing something as often as it can serve before finally giving it up. To me, her practice feels like a manifestation of an ecological consciousness. It is so inbuilt and intrinsic to the way her body moves.

When I think about what it means to undo generations of conditioning that subconsciously informs what we imagine it means to be woman, I find the phrase particularly useful. Because if you compel yourself to actively not ‘do’ anything unless you have first thought through the action, you already activate the process of smashing the patriarchy. This could manifest in really basic things. For example, if I was going to buy a toy for my child who is male, why should I automatically be directed towards the ‘boy’s’ section of a toy store? Do I really want to gift him a tractor? What if I prefer to give him kitchen utensils instead? I noticed last week when he had a playdate with the daughter of the new Pakistani friend I made that he loved playing with her toy frying pans. He could clang them together to make a sound he found satisfying. I felt sad that her bucket of toys included only kitchen utensils, just as I felt bad for my partner’s nephew whose arsenal of toys have absolutely nothing ‘girly’, only pirate stuff, knight stuff, cars, and now football stuff. The fact that patriarchal traditions such as these continue to hold sway is proof that most of us do not, in fact, act out of intention, rather, we simply repeat what we have seen, or do as we were told. 

To embrace acting with intention is to move towards greater self-awareness, to question the purpose of all that we otherwise do without first considering. The asking of why and to what end urges you to redirect your focus and to re-examine certain modes of being we simply inherited or learned through observation or osmosis, like notions of masculinity and femininity. When you act with intention, there is the very real possibility of moving toward a higher state of consciousness, because you no longer do something because you are programmed to, but because the action arises from your will, and in enabling that, you allow yourself to be accountable. The process of living everyday becomes artful.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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