Summary: A commitment to stick to your plan is not a prescription for a happy life. When you try to plan as if you knew ahead of time exactly where you’re going, you might feel more in control. Unfortunately, the control’s not real. You can’t predict what you’ll be like or even what you’ll want next month, next year, or a decade from now. That’s because as you live your life, you learn and grow and become fundamentally different. You’re changed by your experiences. In this episode I argue for a spontaneous life. By this, I’m not suggesting that we should all act impulsively and without thought. I am suggesting that each time we decide to act, we make that decision on the basis of everything we know in that moment. We allow ourselves to be unconstrained by choices we made earlier, if a better choice is available now. A spontaneous life requires that we adopt an attitude of openness. We stay alert for new ideas. We refuse to follow a rigid agenda. We remain ready to listen to the knowing in our bodies and to our flashes of intuition. When we live a spontaneous life, we’re not stuck doing something just because we decided at some earlier point to do it. We’re never stuck if what we’ve learned in the meantime points us in a new direction.
