Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up

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

Instead of preparing an outcome, ready yourself for whatever may come. Open your eyes, breathe fully, and attend to just this moment.

“I could never do that,” says an observer watching players invent a story together on stage. But you can. These people aren’t special in the sense of having uncommon talents. There are no Robin Williams-type comic geniuses among us. We are ordinary folk just like you. The truth is, human beings are improvisers by nature.

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.

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.

Giving up on perfection is the first step; the next is to stop trying to come up with something different. Striving for an original idea takes us away from our everyday intelligence, and it can actually block access to the creative process.

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.

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 imaginatio

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