“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
— Carl Jung (1875–1961). Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology. emphasized that our true selves are revealed not by intention or belief, but by what we live out in daily practice.
There I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, mouth open as wide as possible, POH floss taut around the index finger of my left hand, guided by my thumb and index finger on my right. Working its way between my teeth—down gently to the lowest point of the gum. Down again. Then inward, scraping upward toward light.
If it sounds like deliberate flossing, it is. If it sounds slow and tedious, it is. If it sounds laborious, it is.
But I call it flossing with intentionality.
I’ve been doing it that way since my dental hygienist scolded me:
“You need to work on flossing. You can do better than this.”
She picked up the mirror, held it in front of my face, and proceeded to show me what her words meant. To show me her words in action.
“Hmpfff,” I thought—but I responded cheerfully:
“You mean floss with intentionality?”
She agreed. We both laughed. She had made her point. I had made mine.
Since then, that’s how I’ve flossed. With intentionality. It’s paid off: at my last visit she tossed “perfect” my way. And I’ll keep on doing it that way. With intentionality.
No doubt you got stuck on that word—intentionality—the way floss sometimes gets stuck between teeth. I know. It’s a mouthful. You’re probably thinking: Why not just say intentional? Or intentionally?
Let me explain.
● Intentional is about a single act.
● Intentionally is about how you perform it.
● But intentionality? That’s deeper. That’s aim. That’s purpose. That’s the why behind the what.
Flossing, it turns out, has layers.
I know—this is the point where you’re thinking:
“Jesus, have mercy on us all. He’s found religion in dental hygiene.”
I laughed at myself even as I thought what you might be thinking. But work with me. As I flossed with intentionality—somewhere between my molar and my bicuspid, something clicked—a connection I’ve never made before.
My mind jumped to Flannery O’Connor, and suddenly I understood a moment in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” that has puzzled me for decades.
It’s one of O’Connor’s most anthologized stories, and it may be her most popular.
The plot is straightforward, even if rather bizarre. A grandmother travels with her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren on a road trip from Georgia toward Florida. After a car accident on a remote dirt road, they encounter an escaped criminal called The Misfit and his accomplices. One by one, the family is taken into the woods and killed, ending with the grandmother herself.
Readers are drawn to the grandmother from the start, seeing her as the very picture of a Southern lady in what feels like the 1950s. She dresses with care—crisp dress, lace collar, little violets on her hat—making sure everything is neat enough for strangers to admire, even in a roadside tragedy. Her perfume lingers a touch too long in the air. Her purse never leaves her lap. She pats her hair, straightens her gloves, checks her stockings — always tending the exterior.
She talks about church and Sunday school, but mostly as headlines — what good people ought to do, the kind of families who raised their children right. She’s quick with a reminder of how things used to be, what’s proper, and who counts as “good.” It’s all comfort and fussiness and appearances—a kind of spiritual cosmetics—right up until the trip begins to unravel.
And let’s not forget her lace collar—starched and scratchy, the kind she insists on wearing because a lady must look her best, even for a family car trip. It’s lovely, but it doesn’t quite fit; she’s never worn it enough to get it broken in—maybe like church.
By the time they’re on the road, tiny red hives rise along her neck and forearms, quiet protests from the body against all that starch and striving. She smooths the collar, straightens her gloves, hoping no one notices. She blames the heat, the dust, the damp air — anything but the truth that what she’s wearing isn’t working. The surface still matters more than the comfort underneath.
But what’s charming at first begins to fray. Beneath all that talk of goodness, the grandmother bends the truth with ease. She even smuggles her cat, Pitty Sing, into the car, though her son told her not to — “She didn’t intend for the cat to be left alone in the house,” O’Connor writes. Later, she invents a story about an old plantation with a secret panel, coaxing the family down a road that doesn’t exist. Each little deceit feels harmless enough—until it isn’t.
The children, of course, see straight through her. They don’t have the manners to pretend otherwise. June Star rolls her eyes, John Wesley calls her out, and both treat her nostalgia like background noise on the radio. When she tells them about good manners and better times, they mock her for being old-fashioned, for caring about looks and words that don’t seem to matter anymore. They don’t have the vocabulary to name her superficiality, but they sense it. To them, she’s not a moral guide—she’s just a woman in a hat talking about things that no longer exist–including depth of religion.
By this point, readers are beginning to see through the grandmother just as the children do. But then O’Connor gives the story a twist. The car accident, the dusty road, the sudden appearance of The Misfit—it all happens so fast that readers lose the moral footing they thought they had. As the family is taken into the woods one by one—John Wesley among the first, his name a grim irony in a story where method and faith have both gone missing—we’re left asking the question that won’t stay quiet:
What have they done to deserve this?
Even the grandmother, shallow as she seems, doesn’t deserve what’s coming. So we read on, confused, repelled, hearts racing—until the moment The Misfit raises his gun and fires. It’s shocking not just because of the violence, but because it follows her desperate, Bible-soaked pleading.
Cornered by her own mortality, she does what humans do best—she bargains. For the first time, her words aren’t just social niceties; they’re survival. She reaches for the only language she’s ever trusted—manners and religion—and uses both as bargaining chips.
“Jesus!” the old lady cried. “You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know
you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!”
“Lady,” The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, “there never was a body that
give the undertaker a tip.”
Ironically, she keeps calling him “a good man,” echoing her earlier insistence that goodness can be found if you just name it often enough. But here, that phrase lands differently—less like flattery and more like faith. Deep down, she sees what the story has been telling us all along: even The Misfit, for all his violence, has goodness somewhere buried “at heart.”
She tells him he’s a good man, that he doesn’t come from “common blood.” She insists he could still pray, that Jesus would help him if only he’d ask. Her words tumble out, frantic and uneven—a lifetime of secondhand faith suddenly put to the test. “If you would pray,” she tells him, “Jesus would help you.” But when he replies that Jesus “thrown everything off balance,” she keeps talking, keeps reaching for the right words—the spell that might save her. It’s as if she’s trying to talk her way out of judgment—and maybe she is—but in those final seconds, something shifts. Her words begin to reach beyond fear toward recognition. What she’s said all her life as habit now becomes necessity. The performance becomes real.
And let’s not forget the touch. When the grandmother reaches out and lays her hand on him, calling him one of her own children, he jerks back “as if a snake had bitten him.” It isn’t disgust—it’s recognition. For a flash, he feels the very grace he’s denied all his life. Her touch makes him human again, and that’s what terrifies him. To be seen, to be loved, to be known—that’s a deeper wound than any bullet he’s ever fired.
What happens next isn’t judgment—it’s comprehension. He understands, maybe for the first time, what real goodness requires, and he speaks the line that has confounded readers for decades:
“She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
That’s the key. The Misfit sees what she—and most of us—miss: you can’t talk the truth. You have to live it. The gun isn’t about punishment; it’s about presence—the awareness of consequence, of mortality, of meaning. Under that barrel, the grandmother finally becomes what she’s always pretended to be: awake, honest, human. For a heartbeat, she lives her religion with intentionality.
And that’s where the story turns on us. Because most of us aren’t much different. We go about our days performing goodness—saying the right words, wearing the right smiles, believing that intent counts as action. But it’s not until we’re pressed, tested, or cornered by something real that we discover whether our faith—whatever form it takes—has roots or only ribbons. The challenge, of course, is to live that truth without the gun in our face. To make it real not out of fear, but out of choice.
The Misfit was right, though I doubt he knew how right. Most of us need something to jolt us out of habit—some modern version of a gun to the face—before we remember what matters. But we don’t have to wait for disaster to live with that kind of clarity. We can practice it. Daily. With intentionality.
That’s where the floss comes back in. Standing at my bathroom mirror each morning, I’m not just scraping away plaque; I’m scraping away pretense. It’s slow, it’s tedious, and no one applauds when I do it. But that’s the point. It’s the small, deliberate acts—the ones nobody sees — that keep the decay from setting in.
It’s in washing the dishes instead of leaving them for later.
In calling a friend before the guilt of silence sets in.
In thanking the grocery clerk by name and meaning it.
In forgiving someone who’ll never know they’re forgiven.
In noticing the good, not because it’s big, but because it’s there.
And maybe that’s the heart of it—that being a good man, a good woman, a good human being, takes intentionality. Not perfection, not piety, not public virtue, but daily, deliberate choice. To listen when it would be easier to talk. To comfort instead of correct. To admit fault, show mercy, offer grace. To keep showing up, even when no one notices.
Search all the faiths of the world—all the belief systems, ancient or modern, spiritual or secular—and you’ll find the same quiet truths repeating themselves. The words may differ, the rituals may vary, but the qualities that make a human being good are universal. They begin in the heart, move through the hands, and settle in the soul.
Inward virtues: love, humility, gratitude, awareness, peace.
Outward actions: compassion, generosity, honesty, forgiveness, service, justice.
Transcendent states: grace, wisdom, mercy, balance, joy, hope.
O’Connor’s grandmother talked her religion. What she found only in the instant before death, we can find in the ordinariness of life—by choosing to live with purpose, by refusing to let our convictions become costume.
And maybe that’s the simplest form of grace—practice. It’s inward, persistent, lived. Not spectacle. Not show. Quiet, steady practice. Flossing with intentionality, it turns out, isn’t just about teeth. It’s about truth—living it, every minute of our lives.
The Wired Researcher 