Embracing spontaneity

because saying yes is usually more fun than no

Spontaneous is not a word I’d usually use to describe myself. It’s not that I don’t like spontaneity—love it as a concept and admire it when I see it in others—but there was certainly a stretch of years where I didn’t always live it.

This doesn’t mean I have a life plan. I mean, have you met me? (Oh right. Some of you haven’t.) But, spoiler alert, I really really don’t: just thinking about a five-year plan is enough to shut my brain down. I mean, kudos to you if that’s your thing, but for me, no. Just no. But I think that to some extent I learned to find comfort in routine.

I think when I say I don’t feel naturally spontaneous I mean in my day-to-day life and plans; I usually know what I’m doing a few days in advance, a sort of very rough mental weekly planner. To some extent I learned to find comfort in routine.

However, on the list of things I’ve been embracing and enjoying more since moving to my new location is the delight of unexpected invitations and sudden plans. It still doesn't come naturally to me, especially when it’s winter and I’m already home in snuggly clothes, for example, but saying yes on the spur of the moment—when I want to of course, because the other side of that coin is another problem entirely, which I am prone to—is something I’ve rarely regretted. Instead those yeses have led to bright, shining, happy memories that I’m thankful to have in my life.

Today I left the house with a destination in mind, to wrap up what I planned to write about today. A text—a friend flying out tonight for two weeks and did I want to meet for a drink? I most certainly did, and switched to a brisker walk so I could get to the farther location in time.

The walk gives me time to think how happy I am about the switched destination, how much I enjoy the, yes, spontaneity of it. If I want to cringe, I can also think back on moments in my past when I have been disproportionately irked or thrown off by a new factor into a planned equation. Maybe this sounds strange if you, dear reader, are someone who lives their life moment by moment on the regular and thrives on it, and truthfully, I have friends with just your qualities to thank for dragging me into their joyful, dizzy orbit.

It’s made my life so much richer. And also, hopefully, a little more spontaneous.

These days I try to say yes to the things I want to do and also listen when my body is saying “Enough!”; stretches of alone time are important, nay essential, to me. I’m grateful for not just the space I live in—which has been a joy—but also for its location, which in a very practical sense has made me more active and thus more social.

Maybe this is on my mind because I had a birthday last month, and so I’ve been thinking about aging. And what is aging—aging well, that is—but growing more and more comfortable in one’s own skin, learning what it is we really want, and saying yes to it to the greatest possible reasonable extent. I originally wrote “...greatest possible extent” but I added “reasonable” in there because sometimes, the right thing, for ourselves and others, is a firm no. But I think we deserve to give ourselves all the yeses we possibly can.

Off to my left, through the window, the moon is low in the sky. Only its bottom half visible, the orangey-red of a fruit I can’t quite name, and I feel like 2023 is off to a good start.