Making Friends With Chaos

Written by Patricia Ryan Madson – This article is from AIM Issue 1 (released December 2022).

"You can count on chaos"...

I intone as we start a round of messy, loud games that involve throwing imaginary sound balls. No one likes the feeling of all this noise and disorder. A common response (especially from engineers ;-)) is to ‘fix’ this untidy situation by invoking rules or controls that slow down the mess and work to turn the chaos into some kind of manageable order. This is human nature. Why not control what we can? That’s what humans do. That’s civilization.

There is another response to chaos. Live with it. Accept its unstable condition. Work inside of the teetering mass. Embrace the wobble.

Remember when you were trying to learn to ride a bicycle? My first response was to “screw on the training wheels,” so that I could make the thing stable. We all know that this is simply a quick fix and does not address the real issue: learning how to go with the delicate balance of the two-wheeler. And, think about it: when we’ve mastered the two-wheel bike and we zoom along seemingly ‘in control’, the reality is that the wobble - that instability - is still there. We are simply riding it using a new awareness of what it means to be always balancing. The body sense of being poised is in constant play.

To study improvisation is to study the ‘kinhin’ (the body knowledge) of living inside an unknown and unknowable future, gliding along, using the resources at hand to do something useful or artful. Pema Chödrön said it well in advising her readers: instead of trying to get away from the discomfort of the unknown we should develop an aptitude for what she calls “positive groundlessness, or positive insecurity.” There is wisdom in insecurity.

“We need to develop an appetite for groundlessness; we need to get curious about it and be willing to pause and hang out for a while in that space of insecurity, ” she said. Pema Chödrön titled her book Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion. This seemingly-abstract dictum is precisely what improvisation teaches: how to live vibrantly in a field of flux, an office of uncertainty, even an apartment of landmines. We cannot let this not-knowing paralyze us. We need to stay in motion, in constructive action during this groundlessness.

We do not know or need to know what comes next. We create it. And we have a choice in how we enter this present. Much has been written about mindfulness, or waking up to the “present moment.” Dr. David K.

Reynolds once quipped, “What other moment is there?”

I’m a great believer in making friends with uncertainty, becoming familiar with groundlessness, and coming to have a deep acquaintance with the fluctuating pulse of everyday life. Sounds good. What does this really mean?

In checking a dictionary of synonyms, I find a full page, more than 500 words that are synonymous with uncertainty. It’s likely this not-knowing, the notion of risk, of mutability is precisely where we find ourselves all the time. The charitable void of the unknown is the field in which improvisation lives. 

Getting to accept that life is uncertain is an easy sell. The hard part is to get us to study a way of abiding with chaos. Instead of interfering, we develop those muscles that accommodate the flow. Enter improvisation training, improvisation philosophy. Acceptance.

We need to do more than give lip service to Pema Chödrön’s dictum to hang with groundlessness. We need tools and strongholds during the assault. Improvisation offers this ordinary advice: Breathe, pay attention, stay positive, shift your focus from yourself to what’s happening out there, and then follow your first impulse to add something constructive. What could be simpler? Not!

Lisa Rowland, who teaches improvisation at Stanford University, said it this way: “I think the improvisors’ art is the art of responding. The grand misconception is that improvisors are quick thinkers, and that our training goes to becoming quicker and more agile. It’s true in a way, but really the skill that improvisors cultivate is the skill of responding/reacting: taking what is there and using it generatively. And sometimes the offers we pick aren’t even intended as offers. Armed only with the basic assumption that whatever comes our way is worth engaging, worth playing with, we are able to spin any input into something alive and joyful and unexpected. Part of that skill is paying attention, so that we notice what’s coming at us. Another part is letting go of what we wish that offers were or what we thought they would be. The third part is raising the offer up, elevating it, so it might be transformed, bit by bit, into something delicious. Or at least something new.” (Facebook, May 10, 2015)

Those of us fortunate enough to be involved in the teaching and coaching of improvisation have a valuable gift for the world. We can cope with the chaos of today using these tools of improvisation.