Spontaneity
SPONTANEITY
A boy of two was standing in a bright square of sunlight in my kitchen one morning. He lifted his hands in the slanting ray that streamed through the open door. Then he lifted his face to me—a round, sweet face with a broad smile, lit with the sun and the light of discovery. “Look at these sunshine crumbs, Aunt Betty!” he said.
That was a spontaneous remark. Spontaneity may produce some delightful results, but for something to happen spontaneously it is necessary that certain conditions be present.
The little boy’s observation does not arise, “out of the blue,” but from a personality which, even at two years of age, has already been shaped by his parents, where he lives, what he hears, how he is trained and treated.
His mind is ready and eager to receive impressions and searches at once for words to capture those impressions. His vocabulary is limited, but he knows sunshine, and he knows crumbs—so in a flash he has given a name to the thing he sees.
His fingers reach out and touch nothing. Crumbs you can touch. Sunshine crumbs, he finds, you can’t touch. He has absorbed all this in a second and has made it forever his own, making it at the same time his Aunt Betty’s.
I was in a Laundromat one hot summer morning in Missouri. An old woman in a cotton dress, bobby socks, and thick-soled shoes was doing her wash and greeted me cheerfully. We talked about the weather, and I told her I was from Massachusetts. When her husband came in she told him the lady was from Massachusetts, and he said the weather back East had been bad, hadn’t it, and that he had been back East once.
“During the War. We was in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and they made us march on that boardwalk that goes along there by the ocean, you know that boardwalk. Well, the guy in front of me—there was a little bitty patch o’ ice on the boardwalk—and the guy in front of me when he come to that patch o’ ice he fell right flat on his face. And we marched on down to the end of the boardwalk and turned around and marched back again and that guy fell flat on his face again when he come to that same little bitty patch o’ ice.”
That was the man’s conversation, in its entirety. I thought about it for quite a while afterward. It always interests me to see just what it is that triggers people’s remarks. Spontaneous action, the dictionary says, occurs, or is produced, within, of its own energy or force.
The old man’s story, called to mind by the ideas of weather or of “back East” was spontaneous enough—not profound, of course, but the story and the images came out of the rich soil of his vivid experience.
Something had happened to him; his telling of it was straight-forward. He wasn’t concerned with the kind of impression he might be making on me. He was brief, and so clear that I’ll never forget that scene during the war, the man himself, his wife, or even the Laundromat in that hot little town.
Spontaneous action may also mean “without premeditation,” and this was true of what both the little boy and the old man said. Too often we are overly self-conscious; we play roles. Recently I saw a young man on television whose performance did not delight me. It depressed me.
He said, “As opposed to for example in other words in terms of borrowing from a loan company, you’d do better at a bank.” He hadn’t meditated much on that one. He was thinking about the setting, not about the subject.
The conditions which created his “spontaneity” were (1) the talk-show format, where you have to talk, and you have to put on a show; (2) a time allotment, which means the poor man had to keep on talking without pausing to think what he was saying; and (3) the man himself—trained to value such meaningless phrases as “for example,” “as opposed to,” “in other words,” and “in terms of” because he thinks they sound learned.
The man was also quite conscious of his own image in the TV monitors and had little leisure for looking clearly at the matter at hand as my nephew had looked at the dust flecks.
If spontaneity implies the existence of an inner energy to begin with, one felt that his energy had petered out by the time the man delivered his remark.
I’m being hard on him, and he was, as I have said, young. Carlyle wrote of nineteen-to-twenty-five-year-old youths that they had reached “the maximum of detestability. ” We have been telling ourselves that youth is beautiful and spontaneity one of the most beautiful things about youth. I wonder if spontaneity is not sometimes a euphemism for laziness—an indulgence which Carlyle found in youth. Isn’t it much easier not to prepare one’s mind and heart, not to premeditate, simply to have things (O, vacuous word!) “unstructured”?
If you leave a thing altogether alone in hopes that it will happen all by itself, the chances are it never will. Who learns to play the piano, wins an election, or loses weight spontaneously?
I have just read Jean Nidetch’s book on the Weight Watchers, and while it is obvious that her basic theme (that people get fat because they eat) is hardly a world-shaking discovery, her method is one that made her a millionaire: get people to work at their problems together. Reducing doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a thing the majority succeed in doing all by themselves.
She doesn’t let them make up their own diet as they go along—that’s what put the fat on them in the first place. She doesn’t suggest that losing weight is best done when you feel like it. She doesn’t even say that it works only if you are being “yourself.”
In fact, I was reminded throughout the book of how many analogies there are between losing weight and practicing Christianity. There are rules to obey. You will to obey them. Some people insist that the devotional life is somehow purer or better if it is pursued only when we feel like it. Worship for some is thought to be an “experience” rather than an act. Losing weight is also an experience—there’s no doubt about that—in fact, the expression “being bom again” occurs in the testimonies of those who have done it. But losing weight most certainly has to begin with an act.
It is an act of the will. You decide to do this and not to do that. You must arrange, prepare, and carefully carry out your plan. The combustion of those daily calories will happen without fail, but only when the conditions are properly set up.
Love is another thing. “But I want it to be spontaneous,” people say. They think that if nothing is happening it is good enough reason for a divorce. “If it isn’t spontaneous, it isn’t love,” they tell us. Where did that idea get started? Do we understand what spontaneity requires?
The kind of love the Bible talks about is action, and it comes from a force and an energy within. That energy is the love of Christ. His love creates the condition of heart (it does not come from nowhere) which enables us to do things: to give a cup of cold water, to go a second mile, to “look for a way of being constructive,” as Phillips’ translation puts 1 Corinthians 13:4. “It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when everything else has fallen.”
Christian love is a far cry from a misunderstood spontaneity which is merely unstructured. This love is a very firm and solid thing indeed, requiring will, obedience, action, and an abiding trust in the “Strong Son of God, Immortal Love.”