spontaneous action

Spontaneous action is wordless

I don't know whether you've ever had an accident where you saw it coming a moment before. Thoughts stop. And if action is possible, it happens in a spontaneous way, without thinking, without thinking in words.

Something like this happened to me today. I was walking down a rough mountain path, stepping from boulder to boulder, rock to rock, and my foot slipped. And there was a fraction of a second where my brain was active, steering my limbs this way and that. I fell, but when I landed, it was semi-controlled. I didn't damage myself too badly: a grazed hand, a bit of a thump on the stomach, but nothing serious. But in that fraction of a second there weren't any words in my head.

Words are rather slow. Thoughts are slow. And we are capable of a spontaneous action, which doesn't take that sort of time. Probably the only occasions, when we normally really respond this way and notice it, are these emergency situations, these accidents where something is happening right now, and we need to respond right now. Our instincts take over and it's as well they do: we don't have the time to think in words.

The curious thing, though, is that we could, in some sense, if we had any choice, behave spontaneously almost all the time. If you watch your own thoughts, you will soon see that most of them are totally superfluous. They're not needed. They're not adding anything. And we could easily go about our daily life with very few thoughts indeed, with very few words.

Of course thoughts have their place, words have their place. But it's a rather minor role that they should be playing in our life. We've allowed them to totally dominate our life experience. And it's a pity because our instincts are beautiful, they are finely tuned. We can respond so elegantly without thinking at all. Of course we need to be in tune with what's happening. If your car is about to crash, or if like me your foot slips and you are falling, then that attunement to the moment happens automatically. And indeed, it will happen automatically whenever our thoughts subside and our awareness is on the present moment. 

We have that capacity, each one of us, to be finally, delicately, in tune with the moment and to respond to it in a spontaneous way. It doesn't need to be an emergency. You don't need to be falling, you don't need to be about to crash. Everything is available to us in this moment. And spontaneous action has a beauty to it that thought-out action doesn't. When we are thinking we are being clever, and that cleverness is actually rather ugly. In it there is a lot of manipulation, a lot of wanting, a lot of ego.

Whilst our instincts will protect us as an individual, it is not an egoistic response. It is a much more fundamental, natural way to respond to life. And it's that naturalness that brings the beauty. And there's an innocence in it. Really it is words and thoughts that distort our life and our behaviour. It's that thinking mind that takes us away from innocence and into the murky world where we are trying to control everything. And we don't need to, and in any case we can't.

So I urge you: play with this spontaneity. Allow your thoughts to subside whenever possible. Bring your awareness to the present moment, and watch how your body responds, physically, without thoughts: the grace of the movements, the intensity of connection between you and the rest of existence. All of this is only really possible when we have learned, once more, to be spontaneous in our actions, to be worthless.