This is Improv - Part 1
"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How’s the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'"
Shane
I've mentioned it before, but there are these little mantras I tell myself in classes, practice, and before, during, and after a show. One of them is "This is water," taken from David Foster Wallace, who will be quoted throughout this post with one exception, or to put a finer point on it, "This is improv." As I write this, last night I made a move in a class that got immediately upstaged by someone. "This is Improv." A few months ago, I completely misplayed someone's initiation in a way that felt to them like a denial—I am still haunted by it. "This is Improv." I am in class, and I look around at the people I am with. "This is Improv." My team is having a good show, and I made a great support move. "This is Improv." I am exhausted, but I stayed up late anyway to attend an online Zoom practice group because I know I should trust the process and that practice will make me better. "This is Improv."
"The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning."
I'm the kind of person who can get lost in what I am doing when I am doing it.
What I mean by that is that I can get distracted by the shiny ideal I have in my head about what a thing should be, rather than the drab reality of the work. I can get lost in what improv should be. I should be doing shows where my team, but especially I, are always brilliant and fun and pretty. I don't make mistakes. I am never tired. I always make the right move. People recognize my brilliance, and I am loved and admired not only by my peers but also by the public. The money rolls in. I'm a person. I have default settings. These are what they are, warts and all.
"If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down."
One of the things I have learned from my short time in recovery is that my default settings are to be restless, irritable, and discontent. A quick break from David Foster Wallace to the AA Big Book.
Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks—drinks which they see others taking with impunity.
The Doctor's Opinion, Page 4, 4th Paragraph.
While this is familiar to many alcoholics, one observation I've had about this passage is that we don't have a monopoly on this condition. I think to be a human being doing anything is to be restless, irritable, and discontent at times. The skill is in managing that, and the skills for managing that are often spiritual. We return to David Foster Wallace:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
The true love of something isn't in the highs or the lows, but in responding to the day-to-day mundanity of existing with gratitude and worship. Sometimes improv is a grind, but how I respond to that grind is how I know what my relationship to it is. I know I love this because I am willing to be challenged by it.
"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."
Now that I am most of the way through this piece and reading back through everything I wrote, I think one day this is going to need to be an eight-part series on just this one thing, but I'll try to be short and find a conclusion here that this single sentence contains within it everything I want to say about being on a teamdoing creative work and having that team's back, both collectively and as individuals. Creative freedom, "involves attention and awareness and discipline," and "being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over have people's backs requires doing things in "myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."
This is Improv.
