I walked around my house this morning for what I thought might be the last time.   The forest fire which began here yesterday afternoon had headed in our direction and the civil guard had warned us to be ready to leave.  My wife took the children down to the town and I stayed for a while to close up and as I wandered through the house I was wondering if the next time I was here it would be a charred wreck.  It was a moment for noticing allright - noticing how I felt about all the stuff we have (”just stuff”), what I wanted to take (next to nothing) what I would miss and how I would feel if it all went.  So there was quite a lot of feeling and noticing going on, but the overwhelming feeling was actually one of calm, the tranquility of noticing, for real, not in any imagined sense, that in fact my life does not depend on things but on people and relationships and that should we be forced to start all over again, there would be something liberating about that…..

No smoke without fire

Someone told me the other day (I have a feeling it was Andy Middleton) that the biologist Janine Benyus (whose thing is biomimicry) said that what life does is create the conditions for life itself (maybe it was in her TED talk?).   Yet according to Paul Hawken (and plenty of others) every major living system on the planet is in decline as a result of human activity.  So what exactly are we doing I wonder, and what kind of life are we, that we are creating the conditions where other life is more difficult?

How many words of a second language do you need to know before it becomes useful?   Very few I suspect.  It follows that if, as I suggest in Chapter 15 of ‘Everything’s an Offer’ the improv practise can be regarded as a second language, then you don’t have to become brilliant at it, or even fluent.  As a complement to the dominant way of thinking and acting, even pidgin improv could make quite a difference…..

A couple of days ago, yet another reader (this is the third) admitted, in a rather apologetic way, that my book was in his toilet (or ‘half bathroom’ as you might put it in America). Far from being offended I thought this was wonderful. For ‘Everything’s an Offer’ to have made it into that most intimate of personal spaces seems a very fine thing indeed and nothing to apologise about - unless he meant that he had been flushing it down the toilet….

Funnily enough there was a bit in an early version of the manuscript about toilet reading. It didn’t make the cut but there were some ideas I very much liked.  So in the spirit of ‘using what you have’ here it is:

“A book about improvisation might seem something of an oxymoron. The fluid, dynamic nature of improvisational theatre (on stage or in a workshop) is the very opposite of the long line of words that make up a book. Which is perhaps why so many people’s knee jerk reaction has been to suggest that this book should be highly unconventional. An encounter in a San Francisco bathroom convinced me otherwise.

The bathroom in question was just off Haight and Ashbury, at the house of my friends Mark and Doris. Their bathroom is always stocked with stimulating reading and on one visit I came across a book that seemed to be just the kind of thing that people were telling me this book should be. It was a marvel of design and combined images, text and graphics in an original and inventive way. But it left me completely cold. It looked like a website yet behaved like a book; which to my mind gave it the virtues of neither and the flaws of both; being printed on paper you couldn’t leap instantly from one place to another and being designed like a website, there was no narrative to draw you forward. I left the smallest room in the house with a clear idea that I wanted to write a conventional book, of the kind you now have in your hands - one word after another, forming sentences, paragraphs and chapters and relying primarily on the meaning of the words to engage you, rather than how they are arranged on the page.”

 

A world class violinist plays a 3.5 million dollar violin in the subway and people barely notice (apart from a small child). Which throws into sharp relief the importance of noticing more. It is an example of how our senses are anything but objective, being “tuned” to what we choose to give importance or pay attention to. There are more interpretations out there than facts, even at the level of our senses, even before we begin to abstract. For the full story, click here: Joshua Bell plays the subway

Yesterday, Gary and I were talking to Chad Dick about collaborating with eatbigfish.  Chad is the only person I know who has read the book cover to cover at one sitting (indeed, he may be the only person to ever do so) so I think it is fair to say that he liked it.  And he has a purple one.  Coincidence? I wonder. Maybe the colour of the image on the jacket shapes people’s response to the content in some profound way….

(p.so. At least here on the blog I get to use English spelling!).

It is fantastic to see the response to the book spiral out of control. Yesterday I got an e mail from a friend of an ex-girlfriend who I only met once, about twenty five years ago who said:  ”I’ve become an actor since we met, and having had years off for raising kids, am now working again and remembering what it is to have theatre in ones life. And I wanted to say that I find EXACTLY that my life as a mother, publicist, wife, everything, is immeasurably enhanced by the everyday practice of impro techniques.”  

I got a request from someone I have never met asking for more podcasts (an offer I will try and accept this afternoon) and both Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls have started blogging about it. The fact that I can’t determine any of this is exactly the point. I wonder what might come next?

A friend of mine recently lost four front teeth.   Two came out, two broke in half.   She ran up a rock by a stream and slipped, landing on her face.   I heard about it from her partner and when I saw her next, rather than dwell on how gruesome it had been she had an interesting response. 

“It took me a little while to get beyond the vanity thing, and then I started to wonder what it meant for me as the mother of a toddler, that I could be so impetuous.  I remember, even as I was running, thinking that maybe I should have checked to see if the rock was wet first.   I am a little wiser as a result perhaps, so I got something from it after all, and indirectly, my daughter will too, though she will never know.”

I thought this was a wonderful example of seeing ‘everything as an offer’.  She was able to laugh at her own vanity (and she is a very beautiful woman) and get beyond it to something more interesting and useful.   I am sure she would rather not have broken four teeth but given that she did, she found a way to use the fact.   And it is noteworthy that in this case, the result of the practise is to make someone more prudent, not more spontaneous.   

The thing about practice is that you have to keep doing it.  You can’t just try something once and put your feet up.  I am constantly grappling with how to apply the ideas explained in the book in my own life and work and I will use this space to share stories of how that has worked well, or not so well, for me.  I will also explore share stories or examples of how the ideas discussed in the book might play out in the wider world.