Changing Direction and Pushing Back

Improv and life have too many similarities. So many similarities in fact, that I've decided that improv is just another expression of life. The lessons that can be learned from both worlds are so rich and easily transferable. That said, I am now going to change direction for a bit and write about how life experiences and symbolic motifs can help in improv. But if you read closely enough, you'll soon figure out that this blog has really nothing to do about improvisational technique, but really anything you personally are working to aspire to.

Today I want to write about interpersonal relationships. A concept that dawned to me is the idea of "pushing" someone towards you. Yeah, you read correctly, "pushing," not pulling. To be simple, you CAN'T push a person towards you. You can only pull them--entice them if you will. Really think about that. YOU CAN"T PUSH SOMEONE TOWARDS YOU. It's impossible. Relating that to our silly little lives, if we want people to get closer to us (metaphorically), than we really can't force it. The best thing we can do is to leave the lure and hope they make the connection with us. I don't like thinking about people as objects that need to be lured, but it is the closest analogy that I could come up with to say, "you can't force friendship." If we do, the results will hurt. Forcing connections between people can cause relationships, but will they be strong?

Now for the improv tie-in. Forcing your ideas onto another improviser in a scene can be detrimental--fatal in fact. The best scenes come from teamwork. When both parties are pulling each other in. Think about the Lady and the Tramp. During the famous Bella Notte spaghetti scene, the two adorable dogs slurped the noodle into a kiss. How adorable, yet brilliant! The best results in improv come by a group of people pulling ideas from each other, never created by solely one person.

Through improv and life interpretations, I think we can figure out some amazing insights in how we can live the fullest of lives. This blog is goofy and serious in the same time. I hope you like it. Until next time buckaroos!

Challenge: Education

Memory Lane a photo by Violet Kashi on Flickr.

Education is such an odd thing in our society. We glorify and respect people when they get "their education." Jobs are given, experiences are made, and no matter what, there is always disappointment (that comes later). We have a very structured education system. Structured long ago by the works of the industrial revolution, education was designed with the focus to be able to live a better life after one had been "educated." But I want to challenge this system, so here are my thoughts.

In our education system we have a concept that boggles me: failure. With the system, when a student is about to fail or is doing poorly in school, they are taught to focus on that one thing until it gets better. But what does that do for the other subjects someone has to study? In my experience, those subjects get moved to the back burner and the effort in those courses falls. Remember the days when school was fun? When we did arts and crafts and there were no grades to stress us out. When there was nothing but joy in our lives because at school we were encouraged to do our best and that's all that mattered.

But then BAM! You are suddenly thrown into these things called subjects! You soon need to study history and science. The art value of anything you accomplished in kindergarten is a waste, and then all of sudden you are being pressured about where you and your family are going to spend $100,000 over the course of four years. Then if you're like me...you decide to go to grad school because you feel you didn't learn what you needed to.

Wow. Okay, so what...

The word education comes from the word educatus, verb form educare, meaning to bring up, also related to educere meaning from, ducere "to lead." And that's just it! What if our education system was more designed to lead kids to be successful adults. Some might say that is what we are doing, but many times it feels like graduation is the end. Our system fosters intellectuality and not leadership. What is more important in the adult world? Knowing the process of mitosis or being able to communicate yourself to another person? And now for the kicker, you just took a peek into my ultimate goal in life. I want to start a school. A school where we include the intellectual in education, but we focus on fostering leadership and communication.

I challenge you: contemplate the education you received or are receiving. Are you learning what you need to know to become the best person you could be in our world? Contemplation and action: a necessary part of life. I really need your comments or opinions on this concept. Am I crazy? Thanks for reading.

World, I apologize: this was more of an intellectual rant than a insightful blog post.

Insight: Acceptance

How we live our life is dependent on how we react to things around us. Everything we do is in response to the actions of our environment. Think about it in your own life. Think about ANYTHING you did today. Somehow or other each every action was caused by something else. It's a scary thought, but how do we handle this and still live life?

In improvisational theatre, there is a concept called acceptance. This concept is that improvisers accept pretty much anything that is said or done so they may enhance the scene. Good improvisation embraces acceptance allowing the greatest and richest scenes to happen on stage. In short form improvisational comedy, this is especially important. Trusting other players to accept what you say and vice-versa fosters the best improv. Back to real life: if we take this idea of acceptance at a high level in our own lives, our potential is limitless.

By a higher level, I don't just mean saying "yes...and" to everything, but more than anything: treat everything as a gift. This idea probably doesn't sit well in most of us in 'American' culture, but what if we challenged our ideals in this manner. Of course, it is hard to imagine war and death as a gift, but ideas like those are bit beyond me at this time in my life. Look at this bug. In normal life, bugs are annoying, but if we look closer and see the beauty of its design, our whole perspective can totally change.

This idea more pertains to ordinary life. If your boss tells you to do better work, don't take that as discouragement, but encouragement. In my field as a creative, I put up all of my work to be critiqued on the walls and more than 95% of the time, my teachers tell me, "I don't like this, you need to rework." It sucks and it's a blow to my ego as my ideas are a part of me. My heart is in many of those ideas, but if I treat my instructor's comments as a gift, I can see that they are trying to challenge me to produce great work.

If we can treat life as a gift and treat each intricacy as a gift, we can live our lives to the fullest. A great friend of mine told me that he sees his life as a musician who is paying attention to a conductor (thanks Gary). In this analogy, we can see the conductor as outside factors in our life that we can choose to ignore or accept. If we treat those factors as gifts and take them and embrace them, the results could be astounding. Seeing each moment in our lives as a gift can lead to great peace in our life.

Human Life: See each factor in your life as a gift.
Insight: We don't see the gifts in front of us when we are too caught up in ourselves.

 Feel free to comment! I would still love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!

Insight: Living in the Moment

This is a very philosophical post based on the ideas of something called zenprov, stay tuned for the next post to be a bit different than all my others so far.

In improvisational theatre, the purest and most engaging improv happens when actors are in "the present." The audience appreciates it more as it keeps the scenes fresh and alive. And it's this idea that I want to relate: how people seem to live there lives. Unfortunately, many of us are living is a combination of the past and future, but with the focus hardly ever on the present. Only by living in the present can we truly enjoy life.

To start, let's talk about what it means to live in the past. Living in the past extends on a broad term to holding on to something too much. This can reflect your ability to forgive, or perhaps even your ability to "let go" and move on in your life. Now, please don't misunderstand, thinking in the past is important. From the past we can learn from "failure" and give respect to the works of others before us, but in the context of this discovery, the right balance is necessary.

Moving on to the future! BACK ...TO THE FUTURE! Anyway...living with a mindset of the future can ultimately cause worrying and strife. Once again, don't get me wrong. Sometimes we need to plan so things don't go berserk in our lives, but I challenge all of us to live in the future only to the extent of preparation. In other words, giving yourself the best chance to succeed, but realizing that even though we may have prepared, life in that given moment can throw anything at us.

The only time we have control over is the present. Think about it, we do not have control of the past as it already happened, thus dwelling on it is futile. We do not have control of the future as it has yet to happen and we can never predict it, thus dwelling on the future is ineffectual. By dwelling on the past or future, we can open up ourselves to frustration, feelings of hopelessness, and feeling of powerlessness; however, in the present, we have the power to control our lives and allow ourselves to reach the peak of our capabilities.

In the present, there is complete total freedom. In Buddhism and Christianity, the philosophies of seeing greed, hatred, and delusion as evils or poison is a common thread all being codependent of each other. If you think about it, these three evils can stem from the refusal to live in the present moment. By living in moments of past and future, we are sacrificing the freedom in our lives. In your own life, how do you live? I have been asking myself this question every day for the past 6 months. Am I living in the present? Or am I dwelling in the past and future?

Living in the present does not just translate to human life, but it transfers to almost any aspect you can think of. Read the blog post below this to explore this phenomenon in advertising.

Insight: People tend to live in the past or future, but their true happiness comes from living in the present.
Human Life: We need to challenge ourselves to keep our minds and hearts on the present.

Please feel free to post your comments! I would love to hear your thoughts!

Exploring Advertising in the present

Straying from improv and philosophy a bit, we can see the effectiveness of the balance of times (past, present and future) in good advertising. I'll start with this: there isn't very much good advertising in the world. Now, let's take Nike for example. They branded themselves with the oh so famous Just Do It. When we see that damn swoosh, we feel something inside. We think of the potential we can achieve, but more importantly, we think about what we can do in the moment. Great advertising seeks to recall from the past, give potential to a consumer's life, and cause action  or evoke emotion in the present.

Human Life: Failure

I need start with this: this concept just blows my mind! I'm still trying to figure out how to explain it, so please bear with me. Enjoy!

"It's not the load that breaks you down, it's how you carry it."--Lena Horne

Our society is corrupted by the idea of success. How could success, an ideally good thing, ruin our society? First, let me explain what success is. Success is the achievement of an endeavor. It can be seen in competitions, awards, and not surprisingly, pretty much everywhere. The point of this article: there is no success without failure, and failure sucks. Our world is driven by success, but what about when people fail?

In the art of improvisational theatre, instructors always tell improvisors, "It's okay to fail." As much as a I agree with this teaching method, one thing always feels wrong about someone saying this. Failure is a great learning tool, but when we keep pushing ourselves to succeed, failure is inevitable. And to be frank, failure, no matter how much you fight it, does hurt.

We all understand that failure can push us to great achievements, but what is the ultimate goal? In my own experience, I fail every moment of my life, and part of me is broken by that. We live in a world driven by success, but does that mean everyone in the car is failing? Thank you improvisation and the improv community for teaching me the way out of this sad reality: enjoying life for what it is.

Why do people do improv? Is it to win something? Is it to gain glory? Is it to release? Everyone has different reasons, but I think the richest improv to perform and watch is the improv in which the actors are just enjoying themselves. To be a great improvisor, we need let go and let our inner-child take over. We need to remember the times when everything was art.

As a child, we didn't instinctively have this idea of success, we just loved experiencing and discovering the world--and that's all that mattered! We didn't find out about what failure was until society smacked our face with it! Can we go back to that mind frame before we learned about failure? To the times of bliss and enjoying the wonders of life?

Of course, setting goals in your life is important, but what if instead of living trying to achieve something, we lived to just experience life? We need to live life like it was art. You can never master an art, but you can learn how to get better at it. In all art forms, the goal is never to be famous or to beat out the competition, it's to learn your craft and attempt to master it knowing beforehand that it is impossible--and of course, being content with that. Failure is an unfortunately inevitable part of a broken society, but is it also one of the greatest gifts? What if failure didn't exist, would we appreciate anything? Failure hurts, and our society has learned to live with it and to use it, but what if we got rid of the concept of failure? Would the results be amazing, or would they be catastrophic? I think they would be amazing. But hey, that's just my observation.

Human Life: Live life as if it was an art.

Insight: Our society is structured on success, but oddly enough, failure influences us more.

Human Life: Objectives

In life, we all want something one time or another. It's human nature. Sometimes our objectives can clash with other people, thus causing turmoil and anguish in our life, but if we can balance what we want and the wants of others, we may be able to reach a state of bliss.

In improv, there's this teaching method for scenes called CROW. That stands for Character, Relationship, Objective, and Where. Each in their own respect has significant power in a scene. None of them can survive without the other, but for this blog observation, let's take a look at Objective.

In an improv scene, objective is "the clash or synergy of different characters' motives--the blood of the scene." What the hell does that mean? Well, in other words, objective is what each person wants in the scene, giving them motive for action.  In a scene, it's important to identify what the objective of all the players are on stage, especially your own. When this is achieved, the richest scenes can come alive on stage, and the audience appreciates it. Imagining the audience once again as a reflection of culture, we can see more into human nature.

A funny thing about human nature is that we see things from one perspective--our own. We don't see into the minds of others, and thusly, empathy is vital in the connections to other human beings. To live a truly happy life we need to try to always be aware of what others are feeling and thinking. And even more importantly, we need to know what we are thinking. I know, that sounds ridiculous, but it's true. To live a rich life, we need to know who we are and why we do certain things. In a Buddhist perspective (I'm not Buddhist, but the human life insights are brilliant), observing our self as another person can be beneficial to human life. Woah, I know, I threw a metaphysical idea out there, but what if we did do that? If we saw ourselves as other people and identified our motivations and inspirations? This, combined with the awareness of others' perspectives, can lead to a powerful result. Know your objective--know the objectives of others.

Human Life: Empathy towards ourselves and others is important in a foundation for living a full life.

Insight: In our society, people only tend to see from one perspective.

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