Response Freshness: To respond uniquely or freshly to each new event
Often in life we have done things so many times that many of them become automatic. For example, do we always make our cup of tea or coffee the same way? We often rely upon what we know and do things without reflection, or mentally existing somewhere else when we are doing it. This can be quite functional as many things don’t require much attention, but it also means that we could miss opportunities that a new moment is offering us.
For example, Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists, played his 300 year old, 15 million-dollar Stradivarius violin outside a Metro stop in Washington. Almost everyone walked past, but at night he played to packed concert halls. We may all hurriedly walk on our way to life events, rather than responding freshly to life’s other events happening along the way. The risk is to miss life or as John Lennon said, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”
It is good to search for what behaviours might be programmed for us, and to explore when we are half-awake to what is around us. T-shirts like “I’m awake what more do you want” or “Don’t speak to me before my first cup of coffee” describe this half-awake state. This contrasts with that alive and totally present state we experience when we are completely switched on.
To explore this a bit more, we could take the example of walking through a shopping centre. What is the usual way to walk if we are walking by ourselves? Head down, avoiding eye contact, thinking about something whilst we walk past the shops?
The large and colourful sale signs are designed by marketing teams that assume this and want to interrupt us by trying to jump out and wake us up to what they are selling. The danger with this habituated, non-fresh behaviour pattern is that we miss out on the new opportunities of the moment.
Response freshness, this next skill, is about interrupting that tendency to do the same thing, the same way, every time. Bringing fresh awareness to the present moment can open the option of novel responses. Since our past thinking and behaviour patterns have made us how we are today, experimenting with fresh responses enables us to interrupt habitual ways of acting.
The author C.S. Lewis reportedly once said that “The devil’s crowning glory is a bitter old man”. That is, when life presented opportunities to be open, the person chose to say no. Because life is always evolving and changing, to stay the same means the person must actively say no and close off to those invitations, until eventually he or she becomes old and bitter.
By contrast, St Irenaeus in 150 AD is attributed as saying “The glory of God is Man fully alive”. In this situation, the person has kept saying yes to life’s new invitations, and instead continued to grow.
The goal of the next exercise is to draw our attention to our actions or thinking styles that are a bit entrenched or stuck in a routine way. By actively bringing awareness to them there is now a choice to have a different response and therefore a different experience of life.