#35 Days of Dares #32 Dare to Be Spontaneous
In yesterday’s post I dared you to plan and today I’m encouraging you to be spontaneous. What’s the deal?
Plans and spontaneity go together. Ask any creative person and they’ll tell you to learn the rules, then break them. Jazz musicians are notorious for this. There are no wrong notes, only improvisation. Painters are the same. They learn the techniques, then play with the combination and interpretation to create their unique pieces. Writers are no different. We learn the rules of grammar, plot construction, characterisation and so on and use them in unique ways to construct stories.
Life can be like that. We need to have plans, goals, intentions and a roadmap to where we’d like life to go, but at the same time we need to improvise.
Conversations in our house often involve us discussing spontaneous plans.
‘I’ve been invited to dive on wrecks in Tonga in July.’
‘But aren’t you supposed to be going to Africa around then?’
‘Yes, but if I shift Africa back a couple of weeks, I can make Tonga work. What are you doing around then?’
‘Oh, if you’re doing that I may go to that retreat in Tuscany I was thinking about.’
When we travel, we rarely book ahead these days so we can follow our nose a little and go off track. We like to go off on tangents and find things that aren’t all on a tourist trail. We used to plan every day and schedule activities and accommodation, but found it too restricting. We’d be hopeless on a group guided tour!
Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else – above all, a travel bureau – arrange everything before-hand? Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero
Spontaneity can be built into a trip. We have the skeleton of a plan, and if nothing else comes up, we follow it. But, if we find something worth pursuing, we follow the trail and take off down those paths.
I like this analogy from Malcolm Gladwell. The lesson is about basketball, but illustrates how we should approach life.
Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice–perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again–and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. . . . spontaneity isn’t random. Malcolm Gladwell
So, life needs planning so there’s an underlying structure on which to base our everyday decisions, but we also need to be able to think and act on our feet, to be spontaneous when we need to be. That’s how we find adventure in our everyday.
No matter how many plans you make or how much in control you are, life is always winging it. Carroll Bryant
Sometimes saying yes to things spontaneously is great too. We were asked to do a TEDx talk in San Francisco in May this year. We agreed spontaneously and now we’re headed there to stand on a stage beside some amazing people. We will stand there thinking, ‘How did we get here?’ but hopefully will be thankful we said yes. That’s an adventure!
Say yes and you’ll figure it out afterwards.
#365adventure is a book lover’s year of adventures. Adventures in travel, friendship, family, soul, heart and, of course, book stores!
