Improvisation

 

We never promised we would stay the same,

But only we would shape our change,

From this now single clay.

Mary Catherine Bateson

 

There is also the question of depth; we may have taken a certain path but only half-heartedly, without conviction, sacrifice, bravery or sincerity.

David Whyte, Consolations

 

Thirty-five years ago, an unexpected event happened that changed the course of my life.  I was biking from Florida to Louisiana along the northern gulf coast to meet my friend Jen for the Christmas holiday.  It was the weekend after Thanksgiving when I flew down from Boston to Tallahassee to begin my trip.  Jen and I met at college but we had both dropped out not sure what to do next. She was planning a move to Colorado.  Maybe I would follow.

 

A week into the trip however my plans were thwarted when I was hit by a pick-up truck.  The impact knocked me off my bike and left me unconscious for several minutes.  When I woke up there were people around and the paramedics had arrived to take me to the ER. Nothing was broken but I was too badly bruised and concussed to continue the trip. My father anxious and upset flew down the next day to bring me back to Boston where I spent the next six months recovering. 

 

That spring when I started to feel better, I got a job at an outdoor education center on Cape Cod.  After a long winter of isolation, it was a balm to be living in nature and part of community of others like myself taking a break from school or careers, trying figure out what to do next.  We spent our days teaching children about the ecology and history of the cape and our evenings and weekends swimming, playing, and talking together with whiskey and chocolate cake raided from the kitchen.  While I never made it to Louisiana or Colorado, it was there I began to find my next steps.  And where I met the man I would eventually marry and have a child with.

 

I have often thought about that bike accident as turning point in my life that moved me in a completely different direction from the one I was heading.  It led me to Cape Cod and from there the college across the country where I eventually finished my degree in a field of study and career I had not previously considered.  And then there was the man and many years later the child.  Would E have been born if that drunk driver hadn’t borrowed his friends old pick-up that night? But when I begin to think in this cause-and-effect way, the natural question that arises is what about the million other things that led me to that point on the road at that time – along with the million other things that happened after to bring my daughter into life?  Why should this one accident become the turning point?  And what about my role in all of it, the choice, the free will versus the randomness of the events?    

Mary Catherine Bateson likens our individual responses to outer circumstances as an improvisation.  In improvisation, musicians listen and then respond to each other’s chords, rhythms, and tempos to bring forth out along the thread of call and response something greater than their own individual sound. As life calls to us and we respond, our lives too unfold as an improvised composition.  Sometimes we are off beat, wildly inharmonious, crazy in our own solitary dance.  We get knocked off the road by a drunk driver, we drop-out, we believe those who underestimate us, we underestimate ourselves. At other times, we find the rhythm with life.  There is that sublime melding of our innermost longings to the outer unfolding as we bring forth what only we can give to the wild dance of becoming.