Spontaneity, the Unmastered Game
This one is for the control freaks. These are the calculating folk who look for an edge ahead of time, the mastering types who have to be good at what they do, the planful people who helm such plans all the way to the end, the people who want to, and often do, succeed… except in one area of life — spontaneity. If you find yourself in the description above, read on. If you don’t, also read on.
Any trait that’s prominent within us can suppress qualities of the opposite flavour. These dichotomies are not predestined, but they are common. The control freaks of the world are not good at letting go, letting loose, letting it all — whatever “it all” is — hang out. To do that would mean leaving to one side the mindset under which their life is directed.
But, even the most seasoned puppeteer likes to let go of the strings from time to time. Few things could be more human. The off switch, however, is hard to find. Such minds are strangely designed houses where the off switch for the controlling impulse is in a dark room long neglected. Much inelegant fumbling abounds.
Here’s a challenge for you, and you’ll need to make a few imaginative leaps for it. In a couple of minutes, I’m going to ask you to stand up in front of the class — yes, you’re now in a classroom and I’m the teacher — and point to any random person or object. When doing so, call out a completely random word. Don’t get up just yet, stay seated. Let me ask you this: when imagining this scenario, if you really went into it, did you start planning out what words you were going to say?
We almost can’t help it. True randomness is resisted by brains so eager for predictability. We are sense-making machines and we apply that rigour even in moments where the whole point is to let go of it. Probably after only a few words, some kind of pattern emerges too. Perhaps you pick a particular group of items to focus on or that start with a certain letter. Whatever it is, it’s not random. This tendency to want to do well gets in the way of spontaneity.
Spontaneity is not about doing well, it’s just about doing. It’s not about pouncing reactively on something spotted in the moment, that’s opportunism. It’s action without attachment to outcome, or even the preconception of an outcome at all. It’s a leap into an unknown unknown. It’s the unmastered game.
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Let’s be honest, most of the people are not fans of something unpredictable, even tho there’s 50/50 chance that the outcome might be just as good as it can be bad. You don’t really need to be a control freak for that, it’s just that some certainty always gives a feeling of security to any of us. Tho, I could agree that sometimes the most random actions are the best ones. But that probably would lie more on intuition when to go “oh, f*ck this all”, “yolo” etc., and when to calculate stuff. Intuition is intuition, it’s not calculating three months prior, when to do that unpredictable thing. After all, stuff calculated for the longest time can also go wrong. Nothing is certain, imo. The life itself is an endless improvisation, humans just like to think that they’re in control of it, and that’s why probably they try to master calculating everything rather than the thing you wrote above.