An Improvised Life

What does it mean to "improvise"? What is the essence of "spontaneity"?

Heck, should we even value improvisation? Some might argue that living a well-planned life is a good thing. How can you plan well yet commit to spontaneity?

Well, first, what is it? My dictionary says that improvisation is "a creation spoken or written or composed extemporaneously (without prior preparation)."

First of all, I feel like arguing with that definition. I certainly like the use of "creation" -- my every encounter with improvisation tells me that it is an act of creation. It is the parenthetical part of the definition with which I differ: "no preparation".

No preparation? Are you kidding? When Parker and Coleman met in a dark bar in Chicago and made magic, can we say there was no preparation? When Jonathan Winters walked through a room full of junk, picked up an odd item, and made us laugh, was there truly no preparation? When a Zen teacher and student engage in dharma combat and, thereby, reach a new understanding of the Ultimate, is there no preparation?

OK, so I will dismiss that. Perhaps the word "creation" will serve as sufficient guidance -- creation is new. So, perhaps the author of that unfortunate definition was striving to express this "newness" when he/she wrote "no preparation". That sounds right to me.

So now that I've worked through my own definitional pathologies, what next? Value -- that's right. Why should we value improvisation? Why does "Beginner's Mind" show up in the title of the one book cited most frequently in every informal survey I've ever done of American Zen Buddhists as one of their first three Zen books? Why do excellent, classically-trained musicians speak with both awe and envy of their more improvisational peers (and remind us that Bach was a serious jammer on his church organ at St. Thomas's)?

My training in process leadership at Shalom Mountain Retreat Center is helping me to understand this question more deeply. By way of background, as in industrial-organizational psychologist, I'm more comfortable in process leadership of groups than of individuals. So, I'm out on the skinny branches in the deeply intimate training in which I find myself.

And yet, these branches are not much skinnier than any of us find ourselves when we encounter intimate relationship -- with a partner, a child, a parent, a sibling, a beloved, a friend. In each of these encounters, we are called to spontaneity. We might walk into such an encounter with a notion about how things ought to go, but life (and our friends and beloveds) remind us that the Universe is not set up to run according to our preferences. The fact that this is so provides a clue as to the value of improvisation: The extent to which I can successfully improvise in life may, in large part, describe how successful I will be in negotiating the day-to-day tests of life itself.

So, when I pick up a guitar, or encounter another in a "Shalom process", or sit down with a heart-to-heart with one of my sons, my preparation in improvisation may come in real handy. Good thing I tossed out that definition which would have made that last sentence an oxymoron.

A few days ago I was wrestling with the question of whether to enroll in this weekend's workshop, led by Michelle James of the Center for Creative Emergence, on "Creative Facilitation Using Improv." It would be easy to decline -- I'll have been back from a week-long business trip for only about 7 hours before it begins, and I do love my rest and the process of settling back into my home after a long trip. Plus, there's the annual holiday celebration of the Community for Spiritual Living, my "home community", that evening.

Yet, it now strikes me that one of the required subjects in my customized program of study offered by the University of Life is improvisation. So, I decided that I'd better sleep on the plane and get up early Saturday morning for this workshop.

Prepare to improvise! Nah, that's no oxymoron. It is what life is calling forth in me.