I’ve often wondered about the phrase, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” It has conjured up different images and meanings at various phases of my life.
Especially now.
My marketing training over the past decade has taught me to measure and track things that can be. Like how many people respond to my tweets on Twitter. And how many click on links that I share.
That’s what I did for the 61 tweets on Haiti that I’ve posted this past week, following the horrifying devastation unleashed on the desperately poor island nation by a 7.0 earthquake that left the country crushed, and the world stunned.
But by that measure, the impact of anything I did on Twitter is minor. Even negligible.
The only links that were clicked more than 50 times were ones that others had already shared – and so the figures represent the ‘collective’ impact. And only 2 tweets got retweeted by more than one person. Oh, and I have 4,132 people following my tweet stream!
Contrast this with intention.
Ever since I heard the news of the Haitian quake on Jan.13th, I haven’t thought about tweeting of anything else. Like @Alyssa_Milano said (and I agreed):
“I can’t bring myself to tweet about anything but #Haiti right now. Everything else seems self-indulgent & irrelevant”
(Incidentally, Alyssa also donated $50,000 to the relief effort, and challenged corporations to match her contribution. Then, she went on to help CNN’s fundraiser which ended up raising almost NINE MILLION dollars for Haiti! How heart-warming!)
Through the week, as I went about my regular duties and prepared for my own fundraising event, the “Heart Kids Tweet-a-thon” (which will be combined with the book launch of “47 HEARTS” – see the 47 Hearts Squidoo lens here), the shock and sadness of what’s happening half-way across the world remained with me – and my mind churned through ideas to help make a difference.
Not just immediately, but also over the years ahead. That’s why I’ve aligned my donations and fundraising with two organizations that I know are involved for the long term – Frank McKinney’s “Caring House Project” (to which I’ve already contributed several thousand dollars to build homes for the homeless in Haiti over the years) and Dr.Paul Farmer’s “Partners In Health“.
Yet, with all the good intention in the world, as I moodily studied those numbers and statistics of the impact I’ve made, that quirky quote, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” kept popping up in my consciousness again.
I take some solace (and find the reason for my unreasoning angst) in the interpretation that Eckhart Tolle provides in his paradigm shifting book, “A New Earth“:
“Without living in alignment with your primary purpose, whatever purpose you come up with, even if it is to create heaven on earth, will be of the ego or become destroyed by time. Sooner or later, it will lead to suffering.
“If you ignore your inner purpose, not matter what you do, even if it looks spiritual, the ego will creep into HOW you do it, and so the means will corrupt the end. The common saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, points to this truth.
“Not your aims or your actions are primary, but the state of consciousness out of which they come.“
I’ve got some work to do. On myself – and the way I think!
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
