“When you can’t get it all together, improvise.”
~ Antoine the Worm (Here Comes Peter Cottontail)
I didn’t bother shoveling my studio’s parking lot after ‘the big storm.’ After all, it was supposed to rise to the forties by Monday. Why do the extra work? Surely by Tuesday the entire thing would be melted. I was so confident, that when I went to work on Tuesday, I even chose to leave the snow shovel home. Clients came and went, and suddenly, around lunchtime, I remembered that one of my Tuesday clients is disabled, has a special van and rides in a scooter. I dashed outside to survey the parking lot. Globs of snow still six inches deep lingered in stubborn piles. Areas where people had pulled in and out over the weekend were still solid ice. I hadn’t looked at the parking lot through her eyes. There was no way her scooter would make it up the slope. I did what I always do when I have messed up. I panicked.
The origin of the word improvise comes from the Latin “” which means unforeseen. “Unforeseen” is a weighty word. “Due to unforeseen circumstances,” implies that in some way, we should have the power to foresee. Driving carefully home one night after the storm, I rounded a particularly pernicious curve near my home. Dangerous in good weather, it can be deadly in snow and ice. My breath caught when I saw an abandoned car lying in the ditch. The driver had not foreseen that around the curve there was disaster lying in wait.On Tuesday, I first I took all my mats and carpets and laid them on the snow, hoping my client could just crush the lumpy piles and negotiate a 90-degree turn. But the mats slipped on the ice and her scooter wheels spun. She was ready to give up. But I was stubborn. I suddenly realized that under my parked car there was no ice. Within minutes we had moved my car, and she simply zoomed into the studio. Duh.
What seemed like a minor moment in a day grew into a giant questioning of my entire approach to life. My need to ‘make things right’ when I’ve clearly messed up was only one revelation. There’s something that happens to people like me in the face of difficulty. It’s as if a slumbering part of our brain is suddenly awakened, an intelligence that thinks faster, and feels more alive than my mechanical day-to-day brain.
My first improvisational memory was while dancing in a recital at about age 10. There was a girl in my class, Karen, who seemed to have it in for me, and in a vicious moment, pulled on the fabric of my skirt (it was my first performance in one of those longer, romantic chiffon numbers) so that it slipped off my waist down to my knees. Possessed by the goddess of improvisation (OK, I just googled that, and the only goddess of improvisation I could find was Tina Fey), I relevéd up onto my toes, so that the skirt fell down to my ankles, pas de chat-ed to the side, and scooped up the skirt. The audience’s gasp turned to laughter. As we bourreéd off the stage, me waving my skirt, I hesitated just long enough for Karen to blunder into me on her exit. I was drunk on laughter and applause.
My father was the king of improvisation, always reminding us, “Where there’s a will there’s a way.” He made bookcases out of scrap wood, reupholstered our furniture (yes he did!) with fabric he’d scrounged from a work site. He had certainly not foreseen that his town would be occupied by Nazis, his home repatriated by Germans, his store taken over by the Reich. He improvised for so long that by the time he was settled in New Jersey, he couldn’t stay put in any profession that didn’t allow him to fly by the seat of his pants. Speaking of which, one of his finest improvisations was revealed to me years after he retired. My husband Ron and I had bought the family home. When we tore open a wall to replace a window, we discovered that fifteen years before, when my father couldn’t afford to buy insulation, he had used clothes I had left behind when I went to college to insulate the house. He couldn’t have predicted that this would be a new trend in “eco” housing in the next century. (I on the other hand was thrilled to find my bell-bottoms and hippy poncho.)
I would bet that when placed in a situation that requires improvisation, our adrenaline and dopamine levels skyrocket. That’s why the mind works so fast, and maybe why it’s such a rush while you’re doing it. Choosing to improvise – as in joining an Improv theater company, or backpacking around the world without a plan (yes, I’ve done both) offer the same thrill to some as bungee jumping. After all, you are diving into the unknown, although with bungee jumping, it’s good to know you’re on a tether. (No, I haven’t tried it and don’t want to!) This longing for novelty is perhaps what drives certain human behaviors.
As stupid as my actions were when dealing with scooters and snow, once we ‘accomplished our mission,’ I felt energized and focused. I had overcome a problem, wrestled with an obstacle. It may not have been like scaling a rock, or skydiving, but it woke me up, and even allowed me some insights into my ego. Now if I could only make every moment of my life as rich and insightful.
Lavinia cultivates spontaneity in herself and others by teaching The Feldenkrais Method. Laviniaplonka.com
Lavinia Plonka
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