#2 - Not Everything needs to go according to plan.
“Understand that sometimes despite doing everything right, things can go wrong and the test of character is to wade through the discomfort and find an outcome congruent with your values.” - from a lesson noted 1/16/2024
👍👍 Hey friends – welcome to issue two of Not Everything. As you know this was supposed to be a weekly newsletter. Well, that didn’t happen this time. How opportune then, that today I might share my thoughts about what to do when plans inevitably change. Buckle up. This is a big one: my mind goes places.
Last year, after a health scare that severely impacted her vision, my mother discovered a promising, experimental treatment for her condition in Magdeburg, Germany. With an excess of frequent flyer miles and cautious hopes, we embarked together on a trip of medical recovery but also some mother-son time.
I was excited. I had a whole itinerary planned: an almost embarrassing number of hikes were carefully shortlisted. There may also have been some eagerness to practice my nascent German with her, a language she spoke fluently.
As the Inter City Express (ICE) high-speed train ambled out of busy Frankfurt Central Station (Hauptbahnhof!), a soothing German announcement intoned that the dining cart (Speisewagen!) was open. My mom and her partner stepped up to retrieve her backpack (Tasche!) – packed with her iPad, her jacket, and several thousand Euros stashed in cash. (Geld!)
But the bag was gone. Her chair was empty.
And that’s when, to our horror, we realized that her bag was stolen.
(Gestohlen!)
When Life Happens and Plans Change
As a child, I thought improvisation was magic -- being able to conjure coherent, novel stories out of the miasma of chaos was enthralling. It felt like a superpower. A way to navigate life unencumbered by the 'right way' of doing things. Improvisation showed me a way where one could do no wrong.
When I became a filmmaker, I became deeply inspired by Viola Spolin’s Improvisation For The Theater, and often used improvisation as a tool during rehearsals. Many an afternoon in pre-produciton were spent playing theater games both as warm up for the actors, and also as an engine to inspire, generate, and develop authentic moments between characters.
Improvisation was demystified: it was all just hard work borne of human intuition and prompts. Now it was replicable, something to design for, and something anyone could learn.
Intuition and prompts. Yet there was something more to it. There a combinatorial explosiveness about improvisation that led to new, innovative, exponential outcomes. Rarely were results similar, even with the same prompts and people. It wasn’t until I developed games that I formed a coherent worldview around the mechanics of improvisation.
Complex outcomes from simple interactions
In the games world, I was fascinated by emergence: systems that express complex outcomes from simple interactions between components.
I see this illustrated in Conway’s Game of Life: complex patterns and animations that result from simple rules. I see this in the delicate crystalline structures of snowflakes. I see this particularly in jazz music, where the melodies might be familiar, but the playing, the sensation of listening to a song was always novel.
I am a budding (read: terrible) jazz pianist, and I see emergence everywhere in jazz improvisation right now. I see it in the modal trills that Bill Evans manifests out of the basic sketches that Miles Davis gives in ‘Kind of Blue’, or the spontaneous concert in Cologne (Köln!) that Keith Jarrett conjures out of a long, tiring, and unfortunate day.
According to legend, he proceeded to play for over an hour to a sold out show of 1400, at 11.30 pm, on a barely tuned practice piano, and while contending with excruciating back pain.
"Probably [Jarrett] played it the way he did because it was not a good piano. Because he could not fall in love with the sound of it, he found another way to get the most out of it."
The Köln Concert emerged as a dialogue between Keith Jarrett's immense skill and intuition, the parameters of his environment including an increasingly spellbound audience of thousands, the difficulty he had while playing; and it remains a masterpiece still to this day.
Intuition, aka ‘Playing on Automatic’
In Thinking In Jazz, a comprehensive tome on the mechanics of jazz improvisation collected and studied by Paul Berliner, multi-instrumentalist jazz musician Arthur Rhames quips:
“Improvisation is an intuitive process for me now, but in the way in which it’s intuitive. I’m calling upon all the resources of all the years of my playing at once: my academic understanding of the music, my historical understanding of the music, and my technical understanding of the instrument that I’m playing. All these things are going into one concentrated effort to produce something that is indicative of what I’m feeling at the time I’m performing.”
Jazz has fundamentals that form the bedrock of every beginning jazz musician's toolkit: chord progressions, rhythm structures to build coherence, and shared languages through ‘standards’. These fundamentals set rules even during an improvisation. It lets musicians know when to step back and let a saxophonist solo, or when to let the piano and bass take over for the verse.
But intuition isn’t merely the result of the constant practice of fundamentals. I’ve been hammering on these fundamentals and feel like I’m no closer to sounding like Wynton Kelly or Herbie Hancock.
There are elements of ‘intuition’ that come out of lived experience that hones you in ways that practicing fundamentals alone do not. This lived experience that is the combinant whole of your values, your cultural upbringing, your influences, likes and dislikes. The same way our intuition is the emergent result of our lived experience, the things we improvise are an emergent result of our intuition and fundamentals.
How appropriate then, that these same principles apply when things don’t go the way you plan in life: you improvise, you lean on your intuition, and you go on automatic.
Carl Jung wrote about this in a more elegant, though no less frustrating way, one winter in 1933. A woman had asked him in a letter for guidance on how to live her life.
His response:
”One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. [...] If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. [...] And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing.”
The Next and Most Necessary Thing
Jung’s advice resonates deeply because it reveals a truth often overlooked: everyone has been winging it their entire life. All the meticulous plans, goals, and dreams, these prescriptions we’ve been told to follow all our lives, are all subject to inevitable twists. They are revealed to be mere wisps and shadows, prone to perturbation, as they always seem wont to do.
What remains for us to do, is the next thing that needs to be done, guided by our unconscious. This 'playing on automatic' reflects the relentless unpredictability of life, and our ability to navigate it through intuition -- the invisible hand that guides our choices at each juncture.
Yet, this isn’t to undermine the value of preparation and diligence. Just as a jazz musician rehearses scales, chord progressions, and jams the standards at jam sessions; we equip ourselves with a diverse palette of skills and experiences, values and moral codes. We live as fully as we can, enriching our subconscious and conscious toolboxes, expanding our ability to improvise when unexpected situations arise.
Life, in essence, is thoughtful improvisation. Improvisation, as we already know, builds adaptability and resilience.
Not Everything improvised has to be dazzlingly profound
In the moment of realizing my mother’s bag was stolen, the immediate impulse wasn’t to craft a poetic or profound solution but to act swiftly and pragmatically. Our improvisation in this instance was not born from a desire to be innovative or creative but from necessity.
The weekend originally peppered with hikes across the beautiful German national parks regressed into hours on phones and sitting in police stations; canceling credit cards, reporting the theft in excruciating detail, and tapping away at the Find My app on the iPhone as the iPad in my mother’s bag dutifully shared its ever changing location.
Even then, the GPS blip wasn’t helpful: the location was spread across a whole suburb of Frankfurt. The police, as kindly as they could, told us even if they canvassed the whole area it would take weeks.
We were then faced with a collective choice. We could choose to chase after the blip, and spend more hours hungering after what is almost surely lost; or we could treat ourselves to a nice hotel room, enjoy a quiet dinner and celebrate each other’s company, a respite for rest, before my mother’s treatment began the following day.
The next and most necessary thing.
This was our version of an improvised performance in Germany; our emergent dialogue with the situation at hand.
Sometimes, improvisation is quiet and understated. It doesn’t always culminate in The Köln Concert or a groundbreaking innovation. Most times, it’s about getting through the day, doing the best we can with what we have.
There’s a beauty in this that I appreciate. In knowing that when plans fall apart, we all have the capacity to improvise. To play on automatic. To do the next and most necessary thing, guided by an intuition honed by our lived experiences and values.
Relatedly but tangentially!
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a form of psychotherapy with emphasis on helping one move towards behavior that congruent with their values, while noticing and ‘accepting’ the difficult feelings that come up. Unlike the more popular Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), you aren’t being taught to control your thoughts and feelings, or to ‘reframe’ events. Instead, ACT aims to help you clarify your values, which in turn help influence your actions. This values-driven approach definitely influenced much of my reflection this issue!
- Jung has a whole thing about Individuation: it is the process of self-realization where one becomes more aware of their own individuality in the context of their societal norms, cultural upbringing, and familial expectations. This process aims at developing a more whole, authentic self through the integrating and reconciling of disparate contradictions in the psyche: the unconscious and the conscious, the anima/animus, and much more. I wanted to dip a bit into this, but am glad I didn’t.
- In the 1950s, economist Herbert Simon challenged the idea that all human beings make rational choices that maximize utlity, with a differing interpretation called ‘Satisficing’. We don’t always make the most optimal choice, actually. We make the next and most necessary choice: the choice that suffices, and satisfies. Humans don’t have perfect knowledge, so an ‘optimal choice’ is impossible. Instead, as an improvisor might suggest, all we have are the next, most necessary options. The automatic nature of intuition considers the contexts we are in, and hence the options that we are able to conceive at the point in time.
What do you think of Jung's ideas around the 'next and most necessary thing'? What's next and necessary for me at this point is probably to descope future weekly issues, so I can get them out on time! I love the weekly cadence, but I also love diving deeper into subjects and weaving connecting threads between disparate disciplines. What resonates most with you as a reader?