You can never be sure that your intentions will be realized in practice.
You can always be sure that your actions will have unintended consequences.
From those you may yet learn something.
If there’s nothing to learn, it’s the end of learning.
And the end of intention?
To carry it out
is to let it go.
You can’t grasp (apprehend) one thing without letting go of another. But you can’t really let go of an idea that you haven’t pragmatically grasped.
‘Intentions (or real-time goals) prepare for actions, and actions dissipate intentions’ (Lewis and Granic 2000, 49). Marc Lewis suggests that moods are established, and may become entrenched as personality traits, when intentional states persist ‘because no action can be taken to resolve them’.
The way to reverse that entrenchment, then, would be the intentional practice of dropping (letting go of) intentions which have become habitual.