Years ago I watched a brilliant black-and-white documentary on Blue Note, the renowned jazz record label, founded in 1939 in New York City as an independent entity. Blue Note gave an outlet to talented, cutting-edge jazz musicians who couldn’t get a look-in with established record companies. Blue Note allowed their music to flourish artistically, from which commercial success subsequently followed.

Anyway, one of the musicians interviewed for the documentary made a comment that has stayed with me ever since I heard it. Asked about the importance of improvisation in modern jazz, he pointed out that in life, everyone is improvising, all the time.

Immediately I saw the sense of what he said. Life itself is improvisation. You never really know exactly what you’ll have to deal with from moment to moment. Just like the Forrest Gump character intoned in the 1994 movie of the same name: life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.

“The truth is everyone is winging it.”

Charlie Mackesy in The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

I used to be an actor. The art of acting tends to have two major challenges. One is to make planned and well rehearsed dialogue and action seem spontaneous to the audience. The other is improvisation, a.k.a. winging it. Standing in front of people, unprotected by a script, and dealing creatively with whatever comes your way. And more than that, building on it and keeping it flowing. That certainly sounds like the challenges of everyday life.

One of the rules of successful “improv” is: “Yes, and…” In other words, accepting what another actor has said to you or invented from their imagination and using it to move the scene forward. Just going with whatever comes your way. Stretching and expanding your life to encompass and add to the new scenario revealing itself moment by moment.

Participating in life in this way is challenging, because it requires us to not be rigid in our thinking or expectations. I’ve never surfed (I don’t even swim) but I imagine that to ride the waves successfully you have to be strong and flexible, adaptable and in- the-moment. As Gloria Steinem famously said:

“The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.”

Using whatever has come up in your life to grow and develop your wisdom and character takes guts, trust and faith. Or of course you could cheat and lie in order to get what you want, and justify your behaviour to boot, and maybe walk away scot free from court cases, but unlike the law of the land, the law of causality is inescapable and inviolable. Every cause has its corresponding effect, even though the effect may show up long after the cause was made.

And what a waste of opportunity that would be! If we believe what Buddhism teaches, that problems enable us to grow, then we can appreciate and even enjoy the challenges that test us at Earth School, just as the surfer relishes the really big waves.

“Joy flooded my heart – a joy that overpowered my fears and was stronger than my attempts to control every second of my life.”

Paulo Coelho in By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

As Nichiren Daishonin, the founder of Nichiren Buddhism, taught, when obstacles and challenges arise,  “the wise will rejoice while the foolish will retreat.”

Our choice, then, in this grand improvisational classroom of life, is how we wing it. How we take flight.

Do we Forget Everything And Run?

Or do we Face Everything And Rise?

Photo by Lars Kuczynski on Unsplash