Psych-Out

rock climber

“Improvisation is based on building from what is already given, accepting it, and taking it one step further,” writes comedian Andy Goldberg. One of the first rules of improvisation, any improvisation, DON’T DENY. Accept what’s been established. In improvisational comedy, denial is “refusing to give up a preconceived notion of what is going to happen next in a scene.”(1)

Denial stops action. Denial is our refusal to accept the unfolding moment.

Saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker never stopped mid-riff if he didn’t take to a particular chord. His saxophone flourishes wove themselves throughout whatever augmented 7th or diminished 9th flashed his way. Another bird, basketball legend Larry Bird, never stopped action mid-game to complain, “I don’t like the way you’re defending me!” Whatever the defenses threw against him, he found a way.

Both birds were great improvisers. They excelled at playing the moment. Playing the moment is the second golden rule of good improvising. Every action builds from the previous one. Each response leads to the next. Goldberg writes, “You can’t be so busy thinking about what you are going to say or do next that you miss what is going on.”

Keith Johnstone, another master of comedic improvisation writes, “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged.” Why? Because good improvisers accept all offers. (2)

Great improvisers are great listeners. Their senses are ever alert to what’s in front of them. A basketball player scans, a chef smells and tastes, a musician hears. Great improvisers don’t deny what’s in front of them. They don’t resist it. They don’t sit back brooding and wishing things were different. “Bring it on!” is their mantra.

Rock climbing pioneer Arno Ilgner talks about “hoping” and “wishing” as passive mental states that bleed off our capacity to respond in the immediate. (3) When on a difficult part of a climb it’s useless to escape into wishing that a particular hand or foot hold be different. You still have to push past. (See Lynn Hill climbing video below.) Yet, it’s a trap into which we all can fall. How often do we sit fixated on a past conversation, or replaying a long gone moment, or wishing that we weren’t in the spot we were in and that things will somehow magically turn out differently?

Rock Climber, Lynn Hill

Survival expert and trainer John Wiseman knows a thing or two about improvising. “When facing a disaster it is easy to let yourself go, to collapse and be consumed in self-pity,” he writes. “But it is no use giving up or burying your head in the sand and hoping that this is a bad dream that will soon pass.”  (See PsychOut post entitled Shame.) Stay confident. Accept your circumstance. Use everything in front of you to the fullest. (4)

In life, we all find ourselves in tough spots or in new and unfamiliar circumstances. When there, don’t deny. Accept the moment. Keep your senses engaged. Take what’s given. Think of the two Birds. Improvise!

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1) Goldberg, Andy. Improv Comedy. Hollywood: Samuel French Trade, 1991.
2) Johnstone, Keith. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.
3) Ilgner, Arno. The Rock Warrior’s Way. La Vergne, TN: Desiderata Institute, 2003.
4) Wiseman, John “Lofty. SAS Survival Handbook. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Dear Son –

I often spend my evenings writing.  Well, while writing, I found myself thinking about your first game experience with the JV team tonight.   One of the strongest mental qualities anyone can cultivate is learning how to turn a disappointment into an advantage.  It’s part of what I call resilience – resilience meaning the ability to recover quickly after difficult circumstances.  If fed and nurtured it will take you far in life.

I know those feelings of heartbreak, anger and embarrassment when you sit the bench the entire game.   It’s a good thing to let yourself feel those feelings.  Don’t block them out.  Use their burn to feed that hunger you have to be out there on that court.  Playing hungry motivates, encourages risk, boldness, and strength of spirit.

Hungry players make things happen for themselves and their teammates.  Harry Sheehy — the once basketball coach and now athletic director of Williams College — wrote that every player should have the experience of working their tails off for a whole season while having to sit the bench.   It creates mental toughness, a strong work ethic, along with humility and respect for the game.

Those who are given their chances easily, without having to work hard for them, are those who will have a harder time later in life when facing challenges, obstacles and setbacks that require hard work and perseverance.   You’re learning what it is to bust your butt with no guarantee of succeeding, but are choosing to do it anyway.  It’s a quality to admire and that will take you far.

Watch Mugsy Bogues, 5′3″ NBA player (warning: uncensored strong language)

It’s no lie, as a small guard you will have to work three times harder, play three times smarter, and be three times tougher than everyone else out there.  So be it! Keep at it, challenge yourself, challenge your teammates, hone every aspect of your game in the secret of the practice court — away from the fans, your friends, and the public eye.  When your opportunity comes you will be ready.  (And it will come.  It’s only the first game of a very long season.)

There have been many times in life I’ve had my back against the wall, or I’ve faced setback, embarrassment, or disappointment.  It’s the lessons I’d learned facing these moments in my sports life from which I’ve drawn to pull me through.

Phil Jackson, the former coach of the Bulls, and now coach of the Lakers once said, “There’s more to life than basketball, and there’s more to basketball than basketball.”  If you never a play a minute the whole season (which won’t happen), yet keep pushing yourself just the same, you’ll learn life lessons that will take you far beyond the high school basketball court.

Dad

He Got Game, Public Enemy

from “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver

There is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted…

For tens of thousands of years, we humans chased gazelles.  We wove baskets.  We sharpened sticks, chiseled stones, buried our dead with our bare hands.  We ate grasses, seeds, berries and nuts.  And, if our chase was successful, we tore into the succulent flank of that speared gazelle.  We harnessed fire for warmth and protection, and eventually learned to coax it from the earth using sticks, stone and dried grass.   The sight of fire mesmerizes us, still – ancestral memory encoded mysteriously in our DNA.

Intimately, we knew wind, rain, ice, and unbearable heat.  We huddled together under canopies of stars – the wisest among us could see patterns and shapes in the specks of myriad lights to help us navigate where we were and where we were going.  We migrated hundreds of miles by foot, the trip taking weeks, if not years, chasing elk, or sunshine, or rain clouds, or our sixth sense that water was somewhere across that barren plain.  Pools, lakes, rivers and streams were our lifeblood.  Even now the sound of water draws us in – irresistibly.

One zen mondo goes:

‘Do you hear the rushing of the river?’
‘Yes, Master.’
‘That is the way.’

Listen to the sound of rushing water

For hundreds of thousands of years we lived in small bands of foragers, gatherers, and hunters amidst wide-opened savannas.  Survival depended upon cunning, group living, and an intimate knowing about the natural world. Steven Pinker wrote, “Life for foragers (including our ancestors) is a camping trip that never ends, but without the space blankets, Swiss Army knives, and freeze-dried pasta al pesto.”  (Pinker, How the Mind Works p.188)  We weren’t the fastest or the strongest.  We had no claws, wings, nor gills.  Instead, we lived in packs of a hundred or so, walked upright, anticipated the future in days, weeks and months, and evolved a miraculous set of hands with their opposable thumbs.

It’s been estimated that our earliest ancestors first sharpened sticks 6 million years ago, first carved stone tools 2-3 million years ago.  We tamed fire 1.8 million years ago.  We adorned our clothes with red ochre 250,000 years ago, painted cave walls 40,000 years ago, and began to domesticate plants and animals a mere 12-15,000 years ago.

Cave painting, Lascaux, France - 15,000 years ago

Our modern age with its artificial light, trains, jetliners, fast food restaurants, tools, plastic containers, guns, bombs, computers, cities of millions — where space per person is measured in feet as opposed to thousands of miles — is less than 1 percent of 1 percent of our time on earth. Its advantages and conveniences are unparalleled in human history. We don’t die of diseases that would have cut short our lives by decades.  We aren’t eaten by predators, or die too soon from the ravages of some unfortunate fall. We can cross the planet in the time it takes to eat three meals, and not have to take one step outside into the snow, rain, or unbearable heat.

Yet, rates of depression tend to be lowest in hunter-gatherer or purely agricultural societies, higher in industrial societies, and highest in societies  in transition.  We are both industrial AND in transition.  (Transition to what, we don’t yet know.)  Our life speed and modern worries are somehow incompatible with the millions of years under which our sensibilities evolved.  Our age has been dubbed the Age of Anxiety for a reason.

The Industrial Society, by Manuel Balea.  (See all his work at Manuel Balea at www.photo.net)

Andrew Solomon wrote in Noonday Demon, “In the wild, animals tend to have momentary awful situations and then to resolve it by surviving or dying.  Except for persistent hunger, there is no chronic stress.  Wild animals do not take on jobs that they regret;  do not force themselves to interact calmly, year after year, with those they dislike;  do not have child custody battles.”  (Solomon,  p.407)

Think of these pleasures from our pleistocene past and their capacity to draw our troubles away, if even for an instant:

A walk in the woods,
Coming upon a vista, or wide opened clearing,
Sitting by a river,
Climbing a tree,
The smell of grass after a summer rain,
Looking up into a starry night,
Staring into a fire,
Napping beneath a tree,
Spotting the track of an animal,
Cupping mud, clay, or fresh soil in the palm of our hands,
Potting, weaving, widdling a stick,
Cracking a nut,
Throwing a rock and watching it sail through the air,
Burying our toes in the sand,
The sight of a wild animal crossing our path,
Suddenly breaking out into a run…

There is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted…