Free to Improvise

When I was in college, a friend of mine came across a book called The Book of Qualities by J Ruth Gendler — “magical personifications of human emotions.” In it, the author describes a variety of emotions as if they were human: “In The Book of Qualities' magical community, Excitement wears orange socks, Faith lives in the same apartment building as Doubt, and Worry makes lists of everything that could go wrong while she is waiting for the train. In portraying the complexities of the psyche, Gendler uses the Qualities to bridge the distinctions between literature and psychology, and has created an original work that challenges us to look at our emotions in new and inspiring ways.”

I don’t remember much about it, but there was one particular personification in it that has stuck with me for all these years: Discipline. I had to go back to the book (I still have it) to remember the exact passage:

“Discipline does not disappear forever but she does take vacations from time to time. By nature she is a conservative person, and yet she lives a radical life…. She has a complex relationship to form. She appreciates the necessity and dangers of structure. She understands that the same structure which supports you can also hold you back. The bones of the skeleton which support the body can become the bars of the cage that imprison the spirit. After Discipline has mastered a form, she is free to improvise.”

That last line is the bit I’ve always remembered. The way I’ve always thought of it was around following rules. To me, the point is that you don’t have to follow the rules … but you do have to know why the rules are there before you start breaking them. As with Discipline, first you have to master the form, and then you are free to improvise.

In general, rules exist for a reason: to solve a specific problem. That doesn’t mean that the rule we humans settled on is always the best solution, but it does mean that there’s an issue or a problem that needed to be solved.

I think of this often in writing. Writing is a completely made-up invention. Without humans, or another life form of equal “intelligence,” writing wouldn’t exist. And yet we have all these rules that people think actually matter.

They don't.

You can break any of the rules of writing — but if you’re going to do that, you need to first understand why the rules are there.

Take quotation marks for example. Quotation marks are there to help us understand when something written is a person’s exact words. They separate narrative from dialogue. They clarify and simplify. If you just get rid of them, you need to find another solution for those concerns, or you have to accept that people will be confused, at least at first.

That doesn’t mean you can’t break the rules. That just means that you have to understand why they exist, and the consequences of not following them.

In any endeavor, master the rules first, and then you’re free to improvise.

Anger

People don’t get angry about things they don’t care about. Anyone’s anger shows where their passions lie, where their care (or fear) runs deep. It shows what matters to them.

When someone gets really angry—whether it’s someone you love, someone you don’t understand, or even yourself—that’s a great time to get curious.

“I can tell this means a lot to you. Tell me more.”

Permission to Fail

I’ve thought a lot about failure since I quit my last full-time job to try my hand at writing a book.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say, “I knew basically nothing then.” (Or at least that’s how it felt, and how it feels looking back.)

And yet, in those days of contemplation, when I was deciding whether I would take the leap, quit the job, and try to make a go at it, I told myself something that has turned out to be one of the wisest things I’ve ever told myself:

“You have permission fail. But you do not have permission not to try.”

I had no idea how to write a book. I didn’t know if I could do it. All I knew is that I’d always imagined that “one day” I would write a book. However, the deaths of too many people in my orbit—including some very sudden deaths—stood as a firm reminder that I had no idea how many days I had left. And I realized something important: I did not want to die wondering, “What if I’d tried?”

Giving yourself permission to fail is the first step toward a more courageous life, toward the rich, juicy, messy, often painful, often joyful life you want to live. (Trusting that you can get through that failure is a topic for another day.)

Whatever it is you want, today is the day to start. Now is the time. There is no courage without action, so to live a courageous life you need to start taking action.

And that means, one hundred percent guaranteed, that you need to be ready to fail.

So tell yourself this: You have permission to fail, but you do not have permission not to try.

You Can Only Save Yourself

This is a lesson it took me a long time to figure out, and I still have to remind myself of it often (which is probably why I’m sure these words show up in more than one of my books) —

No one can save you but you, and you can only save yourself.

You can sit with someone in their pain and grief and difficulties, and you can ask someone to sit with you in yours.

But the actual work to change our lives falls on each of us alone. No one can do our work for us, and we can’t do anyone else’s work.

That work — the self discovery, the healing, the diving deep into what has made us who we are and how we grow from and with and beyond it — is the work that makes up our lives. Doing that work isn’t easy, but it is, in fact, what makes our best lives even possible. It opens us and our lives in ways we could never open if someone did the work for us.

Yes, it would be wonderful to have someone sweep in and fix everything for us.

But the only person each of us can save is ourselves.

(However: a wee note to the Universe, which I know is always listening: I’m not opposed to winning the PowerBall, just to have the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.)

You Can’t Get Where You’re Going If You’re Driving in Reverse

“What you focus on increases.” This is one of the most important truisms out there. But what’s less discussed is this: What direction you’re approaching things from makes all the difference.

There is a world of difference, for example, between being anti-war and being pro-peace.

If you’re focused on preventing what you don’t want … you’re still focusing on what you don’t want.

What you focus on increases.

Imagine if you wanted to drive from Seattle to Portland. Option 1: you get in your car, point it to Portland, and drive. Option 2: you get in your car, point it away from Portland, and try to drive the whole way in reverse.

It’s not going to work.

Whatever it is you want to create in your life, find what you want to increase, and focus on that. Don’t try to be less lonely; instead, work on building connection. Don’t try to lose weight; work on increasing health. Put your attention on what you want more of.

Always drive forward. That’s the way you’re going.

Advice

What I’ve learned from my decades on Earth: no one listens to advice.

There’s a woman, Kathryn Schulz, who did a great TED Talk about being wrong. She has many fascinating points, among them: being wrong feels exactly like being right. We all think we’re right about everything we think; otherwise, we wouldn’t think it, right? (Debatable.)

But none of us is really looking for advice; what we’re really looking for is affirmation that the path we’re already planning to take is the right one.

Everyone has to make their own mistakes, in their own time. You can see someone else’s train wreck about to happen, but you can’t stop it.

So my point is: I’m not going to give advice here. I’m just going to share some thoughts. Take what resonates; leave what doesn’t. But most of all: don’t be afraid to make mistakes. In fact, make as many as you can (and then try to learn from them), because the more mistakes you make, the more proof you have that you’re truly living. That’s the point, really, of being alive.