Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Smooth Sailing with Spontaneity

Much can be said for spontaneity. I often find myself winging it, no matter how many plans I make and how much I prepare me for anything. But then, how do I know what I’m going to do, until I do it?

From a favorable perspective, spontaneity casts aside foolish plans and too much prior preparation, thus eliminating disappointment and heartbreak. Spontaneity is also entertaining and has humor in it, which is usually an unbridled outburst of humor with a punchline at its end.

It isn’t that I don’t give importance to planning. Planning does help to a degree, especially when I am treading a relatively new ground, but even inside planned things, spontaneity can exist to give flavor to life. Otherwise an all-planned anything might as well come out of a factory line.

In my life, some of the most thrilling things have been done on impulse, like registering in Writing.com 13 years ago, but the recognition of the best and the most durable thing I have ever done spontaneously goes to my marriage. I accepted to marry my husband after knowing him only about two months, and then we were married six months after we first met. People in my family, except a couple of uncles, were against it, and my mother was livid. Yet the marriage is still ongoing, and going well, after 47 years.

To wrap it up, spontaneity is not a blind, disorderly urge or a mere show of caprice. If I suddenly jumped off a bridge or tried to play with a rhinoceros if I met one, that couldn’t be called a spontaneous act. That would be a truly foolish act. Spontaneity, on the other hand, has more to do with creativity and gut feeling, and probably with collective consciousness, if there is such a thing. Spontaneity is not something that is being done to a person either; it is the person consciously doing something unexpected and adventurous. As Oscar Wilde said, “Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art”; to which I would like to add, “without us being aware of the preparations.”

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Prompt: What's the most spontaneous thing you've ever done?