ReVitalize: Improv Your Act

Several summers ago I took a class called Improvisation for Theater and for Life. Maybe "life" came before "theater;" I don't remember. The class was taught by Clark College theater instructor Marci McReynolds. This wasn't like other theater classes I'd taken in the dim past. Everything we practiced related to what's sometimes called real life. I learned totally new (to me) things about myself. And I made a number of friends who are still close. For me the class, like my first few years with my writers' group or my experiences singing with other people, was a spiritual experience.

Maybe the most valuable thing I learned that summer is the importance of the art of improvisation. In my workaday life I make plans but if they fall through, I have to improvise. The previous 20 years, with kids & schools & earning a living & the money tightrope & all that stuff, one thing piled on top of another, made me feel like I was flying by the seat of my pants (I'll have to look up the origin of that expression) ninety percent of the time. This bugged me. Shouldn't I have gotten it "right" much sooner?

After taking this class I realized that a successful life doesn't require eliminating surprises. You can't! However, as theologian and amateur trapeze artist Sam Keen says in his book Learning to Fly, it requires knowing how to fall when you make a misstep. You will fall, but if you practice your falling skills, you won't get hurt badly. That's another subject for another time.

During that summer I came to realize that perfection is an illusion It's okay to not plan sometimes. Planning and spontaneity are two ends of a continuum. Sticking to either extreme causes problems. But if you're primarily one type, then dabbling in the other type's way of being can be revelatory.

I tried improvising on many occasions: when I didn't know where the plot to my story was leading; when I didn't know what to tell Noel after all his tactics towards solving a social problem at school didn't work; when I didn't know the answer to a customer's sticky question. On many occasions I felt like both I and the person I was trying to help were muddling through. But in the end, even though the results might not have been what I'd originally wanted, doors opened.

These days when I'm stuck, I stop trying to plan my way out of the bag. Instead, I improvise. This applies to writing articles, making music, finessing a difficult transaction on the job, working with a tricky weekly schedule or trying to help a friend. It took me awhile to build my set of life improv skills.

If you're not comfortable with improvising, start out slowly. Designate a half-day (maybe on your day off, to start) during which you'll wake up without a plan, ask yourself what feels right, and allow yourself to be led minute by minute. The leading might come from demands from people around you but it might also pop up in the form of inner urges, unexpected opportunities and serendipity. This is where the magic begins.

After awhile you can have improv days at work. You'll still be doing what you've always done OTJ but you'll give yourself permission to allow the unexpected to happen, and to deal with it as it happens.

Practice your flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants skills until you're able to designate an entire week for life improv. This doesn't mean you forget your kid's dentist appointment or fail to show up for work. Improv is not irresponsibility. It means that you don't micro-plan so that every second of the day is filled. It means that you leave plenty of room for happy accidents, as coach Barbara Sher calls them, to happen. It means that Spirit (or God or the universe or whoever) can finally whisper the answer to that vexing problem in your ear and you'll hear it because you're not yapping away to yourself.

Try it.

ReVitalize: Working Outside Your Genre

Sometimes you've been doing your art form successfully for so long that you don't notice that you've started the slow descent into boredom, that you're operating on autopilot or that your once-vibrant work reads/looks/sounds rote. I suspect that certain popular authors have reached this point. Their latest novels lack the certain something - a sense of enjoyment or playfulness, maybe - that first drew readers to their earlier books.

At this point it can be tempting to redouble your efforts to whip your current work into shape and enjoy doing it...or else. Maybe this works for some people. It never has for me.

What does work is a tactic I call genre-jumping. Get out of your cozy but confining space for awhile and do something new to you. If you want to jump-start your inspiration in a big way, choose a genre or form that seems worlds away from what you're doing now, something you'll have to learn from scratch. For example, if you normally write cozy mysteries or family sagas, try doing a thriller. If you write articles, try poetry.

This also works for inspiration-gathering. If you tend to read within a certain genre, venture out. If you listen to pop, explore world music or blues. If you've been locked into a special niche for eons, you might have to force yourself to wander, sample and explore.

At other times, however, you might be aware of a budding interest; you just haven't given yourself permission to explore it. In this case all you need to do is pay attention to what's grabbing you at the moment and follow the trail. For the past 25 years I've played and sung with groups that specialize in Renaissance music. For the first decade or so, I listened avidly to everything from that period that I could get my hands on. Lately, however, I find myself drawn to recordings by female jazz and blues singers. I'm not entirely sure why. But I've learned to trust these nudges.

You'll know when you're ready to resume your previous path. Or not. Sometimes working outside your genre provides you with fresh inspiration that you can take back to your familiar work. Sometimes it confirms that you're due for a more long-term change.

Either way, you win.