Figuring Things Out

A story about improvisation

Nobody knows what they’re doing. And I’ve come to believe that anybody who says they do is full of shit.

Sure, we might have a few things figured out: a job, a house, a relationship (to use some old standby milestones)—but these achievements are tenuous, always requiring more work, more attention, more evolution. So the figuring continues . . . on and on, forever.

We make plans, set ourselves goals, develop the methods for achieving them, all of this being a means to making sense of what’s going on around us. And yet they only get us so far. As the saying goes, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Or, to quote the infamous Mike Tyson: everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

A breakup, a layoff, doors unexpectedly closing, these are life’s punches. And when our plans fall apart, what are we left with to find our way?

One tool: improvisation.

When I was kid, my grandmother signed me up for a ceramics class. As we pounded clay, the teacher told us—insisted, even—that there are no mistakes in art. Being young elementary students, praised elsewhere in school by Mrs. Walker for writing neatly and coloring within the lines, this was some subversive shit.

Some kids didn’t believe it. They had to know if they were right or wrong. The idea of any grey area haywired their black-and-white view of the world. (And to a large extent this grey area continues to short-circuits many adults’ brains, too.)

But you can’t figure anything out when it’s like that. When plans go awry, those black-and-white answers are non-existent—you have no choice but to muddle through the grey. So instead of waiting on some User Manual for Life, you’ve simply got to put that trust in yourself.

Enter improvisation.

Improvisation, by definition, requires bushwhacking into the unknown. Be it sailing off the edge of the map, or launching into the chord changes of Coltrane’s Giant Steps. It takes confidence to pull it off successfully. We’re a lot more capable than we give ourselves credit for. And what exactly is confidence in this regard?

To quote another jazz musician, Bobby McFerrin: improvisation is simply the courage to keep going.

Put ’em up, put ’em uuuhp!

Courage is a daunting word (even just writing it out), evoking epic images of charging into battle, scaling giant mountains, making impossible decisions. But in its essence, courage is much simpler than that . . . it consists of one word: yes.

As it happens, the number one rule of improv theater is to say yes. When an actor makes a move, throws out a line, you must go with it. And then you must take those ideas and make them your own, always maintaining forward momentum. Nothing kills momentum like the word no.

This reminds me of an article I once tore out of Surfer Magazine a long time ago, which I carried in my wallet for years. It was called “Advice for Travelling Solo.” Top of the list: say yes to every opportunity that comes your way.

Now, I understand quite well protecting your time, that saying yes always means saying no to something else. Yet the opposite seems equally important: the best way to say no is by saying yes to something else. It’s about being deliberate. Dizzy Gillespie (yet another jazz legend—they knew a lot about improvisation) said: it took me twenty years to learn what not to play.

In other words, don’t be arbitrary with your no’s.

For instance, I value my time . . . cut out the needles meetings. I value my relationships . . . cut out the toxic friends. I want to write . . . cut out the wasted time on things I don’t actually care about.

But I digress. To bring it back home, yes leads to courage, and courage leads to improvisation. It’s a practice, I suppose, which never ends. As we’ve said before, crafting a life takes time. Or like my father says (at sixty-two years old): I’m still a work in progress.

A work in progress, of course, means figuring things out. Sometimes in life we get it right. Sometimes we don’t.

But there are no mistakes in art.

-Martin