I was attending an event on Saturday and as anticipated the event was nothing short of transformational. There were lots of nuggets of wisdom that the speaker shared and I found myself constantly saying a quiet prayer to the Lord, thanking him for the opportunity to hear truth and liberating teachings.

One of the things that really got my attention was when the speaker was sharing his life journey with us. He mentioned how he had grown up in environments that attempted to control him. By his very nature he is very spontaneous, but he found that for most of his life, he was reprimanded for his outbursts of spontaneity in many social settings. That obviously led to him living a chained life until; of course a time where his thinking began to shift and he understood the power of living as his “free” best self. Now being your best self has many variations but if one variation is being spontaneous then why not express that!

I felt such freedom when I heard him say that because all my life in many contexts and even till today some people frown over my spontaneous nature. I have been reprimanded a few times; I have been made to feel like I’m insubordinate; I have been made to feel like a bad person and the list is endless. But if I am truly honest with myself, I thrive on being free and being able to be spontaneous in whatever I am doing. I say the speaker freed my thinking when he shared this but I don’t think my behaviour has completely shifted yet. And I guess that will obviously take time. I have suppressed expressions of myself because I try and make everyone else comfortable around me. And I remember when 2017 began I wrote a piece titled ‘Back to basics’. That piece was my cry to God and to humanity, and I was merely saying that in order for me to live the purpose I was created for, I am going back to the heart of the matter, i.e. doing the things that are truthful to me and those aligned with the Lord’s will.

We can be so ritualistic and overly guarded because of the layers that society places upon us. I have even noticed that the corporate world has a tremendous impact in stripping away one’s spontaneous nature. Even environments which supposedly should stand for liberating the human heart; like churches and even our very homes can really do a great job at stifling a person’s spontaneous nature.

My enjoy life tip is this: Allow others to be themselves and allow yourself to be you. You may look foolish to some, but I believe God created us to fully enjoy the various expressions of our human nature as long as they glorify him and impact our humanity positively.