How's Yours?

When I wake up most mornings, I have ideas in my head.

As anyone who knows me will tell you, this is usually a good place to grow them, but not such a good place to keep them until they’re needed.

I digress.

Mornings.

Ideas.

Usually, when I wake up full of ideas, they’re Work Related, because chances are that I brought a problem home to sleep on, like a college student with a garage sale bean bag chair.

I used to have ideas in my head every morning, but these days, Tuesday ideas are buried in an avalanche of rhythms after my Middle Eastern drumming class on Monday evenings. Two hours of drumming on Monday, and I hear Chiftetelli and Maqsum and all the rest in my head until they fade to echoes sometime on Wednesday.

Friday morning ideas…ahhh, Friday….these are the most wondrously frustrating ideas of all. Friday morning ideas are shouldadones. Now, if you have a functional mind (and quite possibly if you do not), you know what shouldadone ideas are: they begin with, “Oh, nuts! I should have…”

You have to be careful with shouldadones, because they can lead to paralyzing self-doubt. To question what you did by comparing it to some hypothetical thing you didn’t do is to stand on the crumbling edge of an intellectual abyss. It is very likely that you will fall, screaming, into the void that is insecurity until you finally come to rest, limbs akimbo, at the bottom of self-loathing.

I awaken on this edge every Friday morning.

I awaken on this edge every Friday morning because I am studying improvisational comedy on Thursday nights.

This edge is exactly where every student of improvisation should live.

Every single class offers me a moment when I chose something but could have chosen something better. For example, last week, we began with a game called, “How’s Yours?” in which one person leaves the room and the rest of the group chooses something everyone has. The person who stepped outside is then invited to return and guess what the thing is by asking each member of the group, “How’s yours?” and getting one word answers in reply:

“Empty.”
“Outside.”
“Metal.”
“Functional.”
“Mechanical.”
“Downstairs.”

If you haven’t guessed that the answer was “clothes dryer”, don’t feel bad; neither had I at that point. “Outside” threw me off. And while that answer was true for the classmate who gave it (as it is for me, come to think of it), it put me off track for a while.

When my buddy Bear went out, someone suggested “hair dryer”, which I thought was a good idea because it was so close to the first game that it might be more challenging. Also, I immediately came up with a one word clue that I thought might be funny: unused. You know, because I shave my head, and all.

Let me just say now that I am a dork, because obvious is almost never funny.

Bear came back and got these clues:

“Plastic.”
“Mechanical.”
“Unused.”

At which point, Bear asks, “Is it a hair dryer?”

He probably wouldn’t have needed plastic and mechanical.

On Friday morning, I woke up with a number of better clues in my head: Lonely. Shelved. Silent. Dusty. Disconnected.

Most learning happens when we make mistakes. Not necessarily big mistakes; learning can happen with all mistakes, large or small, if we’re paying attention and we let it. And by paying attention to the things we didn’t do, we can learn a lot.

So these Friday morning Shoudadones are a fantastic opportunity for me to learn about the imperfect way my mind works. Improv is all about embracing imperfection and running with it; when you think about it, that’s what life is all about, too. It’s not just okay to screw things up – it’s expected. And, it’s better when you do.

As my improv teacher says, “Dare to suck big!”