Intention

People often arrive with an intention written down somewhere, sometimes on paper, sometimes only in their heads. It is usually a good one. Clear, sincere, a little bit hopeful.

What we notice is how often that intention quietly changes halfway through the weekend. Not because it was wrong, but because something else turned out to be closer to the surface. Someone comes to understand their work and spends most of Saturday thinking about their grandmother. Someone comes for clarity and finds that what they actually needed was a good night of sleep and a long walk.

Sometimes it is smaller than that. A person who wanted to understand a relationship spends the second evening mostly aware of how tired they are, and how long they have been tired. That is not less important. It may even be the beginning of the same question, approached from a side door.

There is a temptation to see this as a detour. We don’t think it is. An intention is a way of starting, not a contract. It points you in a direction and then, if you let it, it steps aside.

On Sunday, in the sharing round, people sometimes apologise for not having stayed with what they came for. We tend to say the same thing each time: you did stay with something. It just wasn’t the thing you wrote down.