The Answer is Now

Many roads have been leading me towards spontaneity recently, not me being good at it but trying to grasp what it is, what it looks and feels like. A little snippet from a book, Conversations with God, the big G saying, “The point I’m trying to make is that when you come to each moment cleanly, without previous thought about it, you can create who you are, rather than re-enact who you once were. Life is a process of creation, and you keep living it as if it were a process of re-enactment.” In Five Rhythms I’m reminded of riding a playful wave of creative choreography, shaping and reshaping in what feels like perfection, on X Factor when Nicole Shertsinger’s face flashed through three discrete expressions in less than a second, and Jessie J singing Domino. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrLNwNg6n9k  Though well practiced and highly skilled she’s not performing through thought but being in the uncomplicated momentary joy of a three-year-old. To quote the book again, “Remember you pre-sent this moment (the ‘present’ moment) to your Self because it contains the seed of a tremendous truth”, and by thought I preclude myself from seeing that truth. I’m reminded of Csíkszentmihályi’s observations of ‘Flow’, of the super speed of eye cues in NLP, that so much happens before my clunky thoughts, abstractions, expectations and judgments kick in. So how to get there? Alcohol does it after a fashion but badly, and thinking and learning about it conceptually only gives rise to further conceptualisation or worse creating a cognitive equivalent. My few glimpses of it reveal it to be simply ‘perfect play’, or to make it personal, my perfect self at play. Our problem seems to be that when we achieve it it’s so perfect we tend to overlook it and only notice the ‘fault’ that kicks us back into the ordinary. It’s nice to know the next most popular thing on the internet after porn is cats. Now they do know a thing or two about spontaneity.