The Intention Experiment by Laura J. Oliver

Many, many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was set up on a blind date by my best friend. I had returned to North Shore for the summer from my freshman year at college and was spending my days bored and lonely since I didn’t own a car, my mother was a full-time social worker, and my older sisters had married.

“Want to go on a blind double date with me and my boyfriend?” Sally asked. I’d never been on a blind date and was still in casual contact with guys from school. So, I said no, no, no.

Yes.  

Sally’s boyfriend and his best friend, classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy, were to pick us up one evening in late May when the pink tulips were past their prime and tiny golden trumpets of honeysuckle sweetened the air. We gazed at the street in anticipation from the picture window in Sally’s green rancher, just across the cul-de-sac from my brick and white clapboard house on the hill. The boys were taking us to a party in historic Annapolis.

I had turned 19 a few weeks before, and our plans for the evening felt a bit foreign because the gathering was at a young married couple’s apartment. I didn’t even know anyone married. It felt weird. But the couple was associated with the Naval Academy’s sailing team, on which both our dates competed. In fact, later that summer, they were racing the Academy’s 73-foot ketch, Jubilee III, from Bermuda to Spain, so the party hosts felt like chaperones in a sense. Jubilee would hit a submerged rock as they crossed the finish in that race, punching a hole through the lead ballast of the keel and nearly bringing the mast down. A panicked spectator fleet would scatter, the victorious American flag still unfurled. Yet the team would recover to finish First in Class.

But that would be a later chapter, and this is the prologue. All I knew as the guys pulled up was that my date was the winsome boy with blue eyes. He drove. Our hosts’ small apartment was packed with girls like Sally and me, hair long and loose, in sandals and sundresses, and guys like our dates, looking conspicuously conservative in an anti-miliary era of political protests. 

We sat on the carpet. My date made me laugh, which, truth be told, I find irresistible in a man, in a friend, and in pretty much anyone. But when he mentioned an experiment he’d just completed for his final class in Electrical Engineering II, I stopped laughing and leaned in.  

He was curious about the power of intention, he said, about whether there was such a thing and whether or not it could be measured. Could intention, which is just a thought, be communicated without language or touch? 

If there is anything I find more compelling than a sense of humor, it’s innate curiosity and the creativity to turn a boring assignment into a fascinating one. I briefly wondered how many weeks there were until that transatlantic race to Spain. 

To test his hypothesis that intention is a vibration that can be transmitted without a conductor, my date had wired two electrodes to a rubber plant in the basement lab of Michelson Hall. The electrodes were connected to a Wheat Stone Bridge Circuit and a strip chart recorder.

We had placed our drinks on the rustic oak coffee table by then, and I scooted closer to hear him describe what happened next over the bubble of conversing partygoers and the harmony of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. 

When he entered the lab and turned on the lights, as expected, the plant reacted modestly on the strip chart readout. But when he picked up a pair of scissors then cut into a leaf, the plant reacted wildly, as if distressed, or in pain. 

There were many obvious reasons for this—the hydrostatic pressure in the molecules of the leaf had been disrupted for one thing, so this result was inconclusive, “But here’s the interesting part,” my date said, just as I thought, you’re the interesting part. 

“The next day, I went to the lab, picked up the scissors, and just imagined cutting into the leaf, and the recording on the strip chart went crazy, off the charts.” He smiled at me with raised brows, letting me come to my own conclusions, which I did. I smiled back. 

Then I married him. 

This happened so many years ago, in a galaxy so far away that only our original intention still shines, carried to the present at the speed of light from a star that no longer exists. But I’ve come to believe that intention, which is just a thought, does carry an energy the recipient can feel. Is it true? 

I began writing this column two years ago today. That’s 104 columns since the day that we met. My intention? To share stories about me that end in you, because in reality, there is only us. 

Happy Anniversary, beloveds. Happy Anniversary. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.