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Analysis: I Did Not Intend To Be Here

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I Did Not Intend to Be Here
A certain German philosopher once wrote that because we have only one life, we can never know whether or not we have made the best decisions in our path. No one can truthfully say what he should or should not do, nor can he say what he should or should not have done. He can only say, and even then with little assurance, what he will or will not do. With this knowledge, according to the philosopher, I could not express intention in this statement, past or present, having no knowledge of the outcome of any decision I have made. This summer, I composed the following passage, drawing upon an earlier experience in South Africa, somewhere else entirely. Rifling through my past writing, I found that the excerpt aptly applies to a discussion of intention within this context.
“He kneeled at the bank of the river and stared at his reflection. A bearded man stared back. As he dipped his hands into the brown water, his arms disappeared beneath the surface. He shook his arms in the water, cleaning them, and then gathered some water in his hands to splash his face. He looked down again, and now the reflection rippled, fractured by the movement of the brown water. He could not see into the depths of the …show more content…

It becomes relevant only through interpretation, intention and meaning distilled from the murky waters of an obscure art and an opaque soul. This essay and the passage come to reflect the formless deluge of an intentional heart taking shape through the damming and distillation of my mind and its decisions. The thrashing about of an arm in the water becomes the decision to transfer schools, and with the trashing comes a new clarity in the river. If I am here, I did not intend to be and therefore cannot say why I am. I can only cast about for an interpretation of my conscious decisions and wonder if I really know myself at

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