Try a Little Spontaneity to Spice Up Your Life

When you walked into high school for the first time, odds are someone, probably a parent, told you these would be the best years you would ever get. There was logic behind it. Once the diploma was in hand, the story went, everything turned into work and obligation until the day you finally retired. Nobody expected you to lean back and savor your days before then. And that arrangement fell apart entirely if you happened to die before retirement ever arrived. We are living through a stretch of real uncertainty now, and that old script is starting to break down. More people are catching on to the idea that life holds something beyond schedules and careful structure.

Joel Osteen, the pastor out of Houston who draws a crowd well past the Christian audience, once put it this way: no one ever reached the end of his life wishing he had logged more hours at the office. You could read a line like that as a small sign that we are growing up a little, all of us together.

Planning ahead in business is not a flaw. People call it smart, and they are right. Spontaneity, though, carries its own quiet advantages. Say a plan falls through at the last minute. The person who leaves room for surprise is not flattened by it; they shrug and reschedule. There is also a pattern worth watching: the more rigidly structured someone is, the more intense they tend to be, and intense people often struggle to actually enjoy themselves. A dose of the unplanned can loosen those knots.

Think of the married couples who get so swallowed by running a household, holding down jobs, and covering the bills that the strain starts bleeding into the bedroom. Some of them climb back out by doing something unscripted. They go out, they act a little reckless, they behave like the two people who first fell for each other.

Spend any time studying psychology and a strange idea surfaces early: there may be no such thing as a purely mental illness or a purely physical one. Each condition traces back to a single whole-person root. Western medicine, built around the allopathic habit of treating every symptom as its own separate problem, tends to miss this. Set aside the straightforward birth defects, and most illnesses seem to grow out of stress and anxiety. That stress usually comes from the same place: grinding ourselves down trying to meet whatever society demands, and taking the whole thing far too seriously.

Do not rush to grow up. It is almost certainly the advice you hand your own kids, and plenty of parents would do well to swallow their own medicine. What really separates a child from an adult? The child heads off to school until roughly eighteen. The adult heads to a job and earns the money that keeps life running. Past that, the gap is thin. Both make friends. One does it on a playground; the other does it over a few beers at the bar after work.

A housewife once remarked that men never really change, and neither do women. Everyone ages, but they keep right on playing with toys. The toys just get bigger and more expensive.

Since you never truly retire anyway, the last thing you want is to bury yourself in work and postpone living until some imaginary day when the labor stops. Research points the other direction. The longer people keep working, the longer they tend to live. A lot of folks who bailed out the moment Social Security kicked in were gone inside ten years. And Social Security was never meant to carry you; it was built as a supplement, something to let you work a little less. Make a few investments and you can lean on those, or open a small business once you hit your prime.

Knowing retirement is a bit of a myth can actually free you. It becomes a reason to take life one day at a time and keep your attention planted in the present. You have the rest of your years to chase your goals. And if you die young, those goals stop mattering anyway. Living in the present asks for a real commitment to growing as a person, and the payoff is the freedom to live on terms you set yourself.

A teacher in the Bible told people to become as a little child. A child moves through the day without a care and enjoys it, carrying no doubt, trusting that the parents or God or the universe has already sorted everything out. We lose that as we age. The demands pile up, we drift out of touch with what we feel, and that disconnection is where stress-related illness and anxiety find their opening. Psychology hands us a way back. Understand how the mind works and you can start to reprogram yourself. People who stay committed to that work often report that life has a way of handing back some of the years they lost while they were struggling just to keep up.

E Bishop Wooten

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