The Ecstatic Radio

Today I called a friend who I haven’t seen in years. He picked up his house phone, and I was surprised to learn he was still in Boston. I asked him what he was doing. He was just hanging around the house, he said. I biked two neighborhoods over and we were suddenly in the same room. I hadn’t planned on calling him until my fingers were on the phone keys that afternoon.

I remember this kind of thing happening so much more when I was younger, before life began to masquerade itself as an endless array of obligations. Two years ago, I would never have called my friend because my whole day would have already been booked. (And the day after that. And the day after that.)  Friends, meetings, work, appointments, errands, all would have kept me from making such a spontaneous phone call.

Our culture lacks a mechanism for encouraging us to take time for ourselves – time we don’t plan on addressing specific agenda items, completing to-do lists. It simply doesn’t fit with our culture’s incessant pursuit of increased productivity. The irony is that our infatuation with efficiency, though adept at maximizing things for us to do, is quite ill-equipped to deliver us things like relaxation, happiness, and enjoyment.

Un-scheduled time is not the same thing as the “free time” we try to fit into our days and weeks, though both are vital to our creativity and humanness. We often schedule our free time with a different sort of commitment: dinner with friends, a show, concert, shopping, yoga. Also, when we schedule free time into our routines, the assumption is that the rest of our time is not free. The rest of our time is designated specific things, not to be interrupted by our trivial whims. When we live a scheduled life, we learn to write off our most spontaneous and creative impulses as impracticalities, impossibilities.

Time left un-scheduled, on the other hand, is inherently full of surprise. There is the thrill of waking up and not knowing exactly what you’ll do that day. Un-scheduled time demands spontaneity, that we be creative. All of the sudden, we need to assess what we want to do in this moment, not what we had planned on doing days or months earlier. It cherishes the diversity of our desires, and gives us a chance to live on our best impulses.

The thrill of same day plans! A friend might call and ask you to hang out … and you might accept, rather than plan a time for a month down the road. Maybe you’re overcome by the desire to see the ocean, to go for a bike ride, to write a letter.  So … you do! Maybe your body is exhausted, so you sleep late or nap or dream in the afternoon breeze, windows open.

These are the daily activities. The same goes for our long-term plans, our visions for our future. We, as individuals, are changing all the time. And the world is changing with us. So when we commit ourselves daily to time spent spontaneously, we open up a conscious, flexible relationship between ourselves and the world. And this is what should inform our bigger decisions.

Un-scheduled time nourishes our sense of freedom, our agency. It connects us with the reality that we can always choose to do anything. And we begin to notice the world around us: the cat’s graceful walk, the patterns of steam rising from a cup of tea, the smell of a book, a look of pure love from a friend.

Spontaneity is the thing that lets our imagination breathe. Without it, routines rule our sense of what is possible. If we only allow ourselves to interact in this world with the crutch of a concrete plan or schedule, then the world around us dies.  It recedes from our most lucid grasp and becomes the object of an increasingly rigid mind. Tragic.

So our struggle is not to reclaim just a little more free time, a little less work. We should restructure our lives totally to incorporate a daily sense of spontaneous possibility.

Not everything needs to go according to plan. In fact, I’d say our best destinies will depend on frequent and spontaneous derailments. We’d do well to carve out some room for them in our schedules.