Improvisation In Life & Art..

There is a book entitled Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch that I have read and re-read to the point that the pages are wearing thin and the cover has had to be taped back on three times, the most recent of which was just last night. I wanted to share some of it with you so, as is my customary practice, I opened it up to a random page to share whatever passage chose to reveal itself to me this morning. Coincidentally (or not!) I opened right up to the Miles Davis quote I shared at the end of my previous entry. Here are two excerpts from the chapter that presented itself today:

The Power of Mistakes

Do not fear mistakes. There are none. ~ Miles Davis

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. ~ M. C. Richards

We all know how pearls are made. When a grain of grit accidentally slips into an oyster's shell, the oyster encysts it, secreting more and more of a thick, smooth mucus that hardens in microscopic layer after layer over the foreign irritation until it becomes a perfectly smooth, round, hard, shiny thing of beauty. The oyster thereby transforms both the grit and itself into something new, transforming the intrusion of error or otherness into its system, completing the gestalt according to its own oyster nature. 

If the oyster had hands, there would be no pearl. Because the oyster is forced to live with the irritation for an extended period of time, the pearl comes to be. 

In school, in the workplace, in learning an art or sport, we are taught to fear, hide, or avoid mistakes. But mistakes are of incalculable value to us. There is first the value of mistakes as the raw material of learning. If we don't make mistakes, we are unlikely to make anything at all. Tom Watson, for many years the head of IBM, said, "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." But more important, mistakes and accidents can be the irritating grains that become pearls; they present us with unforeseen opportunities, they are fresh sources of inspiration in and of themselves. We come to regard our obstacles as ornaments, as opportunities to be exploited and explored.

Seeing and using the power of mistakes does not mean that anything goes. Practice is rooted in self-correction and refinement, working toward clearer and more reliable techniques. But when a mistake occurs we can treat it either as an invaluable piece of data about our technique or as a grain of sand around which we can make a pearl.

...

Life throws at us innumerable irritations that can be mobilized for pearl making, including all the irritating people who come our way. Occasionally we are stuck with a petty tyrant who makes our life hell. Sometimes these situations, while miserable at the time, cause us to sharpen, focus, and mobilize our inner resources in the most surprising ways. We become, then, no longer victims of circumstance, but able to use circumstance as the vehicle of creativity. This is the well-known principle of Jujitsu, taking your opponent's blows and and using their own energy to deflect them to your advantage. When you fall, you raise yourself up by pushing against the spot where you fell. 

The Vietnamese Buddhist poet-priest, Thich Nhat Hanh, devised an interesting telephone meditation. The sound of the telephone ringing, and our semiautomatic instinct to jump up and answer it, seem the very opposite of meditation. Ring and reaction bring out the essence of the choppy, nervous character of the way time is lived in our world. He says use the first ring as a reminder, in the midst of whatever you were doing, of mindfulness, a reminder of breath and your own center. Use the second and third rings to breathe and smile. If the caller wants to talk, he or she will wait for the fourth ring, and you will be ready. What Thich Nhat Hanh is saying here is that mindfulness, practice, and poetry in life are not to be reserved for a time and place where everything is perfect; we can use the very instruments of society's nervous pressures on us to relieve the pressure. Even under the sound of helicopters--and this is a man who buried many children in Vietnam to the roar of helicopters and bombs--he can say, "Listen, listen; this sound brings me back to my true self."

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Where do you find your true self? 

Have you made "mistakes" that you can re-view in search of your own precious pearls?