Don’t you all experience it once in a while? Hideous demons trying to penetrate your everyday life. Demons like fear of the future, fear of the unknown, scepticism when it comes to commitments, avoiding change or mistrust instead of trust. How often do we lack the willingness to just try something new? We are burdened by an unwillingness to leave well-known paths. Or else we benumb ourselves with things we neither want nor need.
All those are the reasons why we humans withdraw and thus minimize our personal lives. Instead of promoting our talents and potential, we make ourselves smaller than we actually are. We try to gain security through precise planning, but said security is only allegedly secure. In return, we reduce ourselves. Step by step, the unfolding process of our lives decreases and a rather unpleasant, self-enhancing vicious circle starts. Our joy of life disappears, our social life is reduced.
Between the ears, more and more assumptions are made; our sorrows threaten to smother us. Asking questions about all the possible evil scenarios that might befall us gets more and more domineering and objections rule our thinking. And fear will grow, sorrows will develop a life of their own and the joy of life is lost. All this will happen if you are not willing to live your life in self-responsibility, to actively enjoy what happiness life has to offer you and to leave no chance to moroseness through an agile life-style.
Consequently, I believe that, in private life as well as in our other projects, an agile way of living makes everything a lot easier. There is no need to always plan everything down to the most intricate detail and think about all possible consequences. After all, we will never know which of the assumptions we make will be valid in the future, anyway. So come on and let us push back all those brainy excesses that basically only burden those miserable lives of ours! Because our fears, too, first and foremost happen between the ears.
As far as I am concerned, I firmly believe that we are much happier and more content if we practice agile living. A non-agile life also prevents many couples to go ahead with a very natural step – namely to have children. Because if I will always and throughout all my life evaluate, plan, explain and safeguard everything, then children will very easily be just perceived as an unreasonable risk which only daredevils would be willing to take. And then, once again, something absolutely self-evident is taken away from your life.
In my book, having children is part of an agile life. Our children enriched my life in more than just the emotional dimension to a more than huge extent. I am almost tempted to ask: what is a life without children?
Especially children are something you should not plan. Instead, you have to “let them happen”. They are probably the most natural way of finding meaning in life and enrich our diversity in life. And it can only be a hindrance to plan them, because the right moment will never really come. To make up for it, you will (hopefully) have a life-long experience. Incidentally, the attempt at helping them in life a little cannot be planned either. Actually, it is a highly agile project.
So you could say that “agile living” also helps in private life if you want to kick out the demons. Naturally, living in an agile way will give you a far more light-hearted life – an agile life will make you more content and happier.
The only reason I am recommending this is that it is my own personal experience.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
These were ideas I had while sitting in the train from Frankfurt to Munich today.
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