I sometimes hear complaints from adult students that their jobs aren’t creative or rewarding. I wonder. Joy seems not so much dependent on the conditions of our external reality as it is on our way of looking at life. We apportion value. It is not intrinsic.

Benjamin Franklin reminds us that “time lost is never found again.”

be?” A constructive response to a mistake is to notice it, acknowledge it, and, if possible, use it. Artists do this all the time—capitalize on an unplanned paint dribble.

As improvisers we discover that we don’t need this unrealistic guarantee to begin. The only real failure is not doing anything.

“The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes,” said Marcel Proust.

For the improviser it is: ready, fire, aim. We begin before there is a plan. What we do moves us forward and gives us more information about how to proceed. The doing itself becomes the teacher and guide.

Remember what a delight it was when a teacher said: “Let’s go outside today and have class under the big oak tree”? Just moving outside seemed mischievous, didn’t it?

While we can’t control what we find inside the box, we can always control our response to it. Discover what is right, what is interesting, what is useful about the gift that appears to you. Avoid expressing disapproval. Be a gracious receiver. When we train our minds to accept whatever arises, ideas grow, and we nourish the garden of our

American Zen writer Alan Watts, clearly an improviser in spirit, named one of his books The Wisdom of Insecurity. He knew that life is all about balancing, not about being balanced.