Kickstarter #1 - Spontaneity

All of this week and next, let me introduce you to 10 simple measures you could put in place and practice right where you are in your very corner of life. Some of these aspects may be downright straightforward and familiar, but we all could do with a little reminding. Some may be things we’re considering for the first time and have never quite considered them as being capable of injecting some life back into your life. Well are you one of many who complain about living from one day to the next with hardly a chance to do anything pleasurable?

The bottomline is that life can be dull and boring. We all fall into a routine in our 7-day 24-hour cycle. Everything is structured. There is a sequence to how things unfold in your day and how your typical week will pan out. Does this reflect your schedule? How about today? Did the alarm go off at 7am? You chow down your breakfast with a quick flip of the newspapers and you’re out the door by 8am. You join the traffic crawl to this place called ‘The Office’ and you wave hi to the security guard at the foot of your office tower minutes to 9 o’clock, before greeting your company receptionist on the 6th floor. You know what’s ahead and it’s a day-in-day-out set course. You can do it with your eyes closed.

How unexciting! Can anything change? Can life be less predictable? Sure it can! And you have the power to inject some pizzazz into the seemingly mundane ho-hum of your workday and week. So what can you do? Hmmm…have you tried surprising yourself? It’s a curative formula that throws all plans out the window and is all about impulse and instincts? It’s called Spontaneity.Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary defines Spontaneity as being “the quality or state of being spontaneous, or acting from native feeling, proneness, or temperament, without constraint or external force”.

Someone’s said that "spontaneity is the quality of being able to do something just because you feel like it at the moment, of trusting your instincts, of taking yourself by surprise and snatching from the clutches of your well-organised routine, a bit of unscheduled plea". You have the power to break the cycles in your life. Instead of getting up at 7, why not sleep in an extra half hour, catch that direct bus to work on those fuss-free bus lanes and call for a breakfast meeting with the secretary empowered to buy her favourite breakfast for the department and you paying for it of course. Oh and how about walking up to your 6th floor office just to get the blood circulating for the day ahead? You don’t have to do things today the way you’ve always done them before.

You don’t think about being spontaneous, you just do it. It comes from within you to do what you like, how you like it and when you want it. It just happens – unplanned, unstructured and best of all, unexpected but still within your power to shape it.

Try something today that’s outside of your regular motion and you’d find life so much more fulfilling and exciting with those sparks of spontaneity.