a close friend and colleague. While the recording was playing in my car, the tape-loop of my ruptured friendship was playing in my head, the same few rueful thoughts in different combinations and permutations. Everyone gets caught playing those old tapes about mother, father, ex-lover, ex-employer. In playing these tapes we bind ourselves up in resentment or regret. I decided to try listening to the novel as a simple mindfulness exercise: just get through a three-minute segment with total attention. But I could barely make it through a minute before my inner tape snuck in and captured my consciousness. Half an hour later I was still hitting the rewind button. After an hour I finally succeeded in getting through the three minutes of storytelling, but just barely.
In many schools of meditation, we first learn to steady ourselves by counting our breaths. Just breathe regularly, and count each exhalation, from one to ten, then start over again. If you lose count, restart from one. It seems simple to do this for a few minutes. But it can be quite challenging to get past the number three. Consciousness is often touted as the glory of the human race. Actually, it’s not so hot.
• • •
Cross your arms over your chest. Simple. Now uncross them and cross them in the opposite direction. Perhaps nervous giggles break out: we feel clumsy and discover that we have formed a lifetime habit of crossing right over left or left over right. To do it the other way around feels funny, strange, uncomfortable. We get comfortable with a certain way of doing or seeing, and that becomes the universe of possibility. Now think back to how many times in the past you’ve lit up with the realization that life could be so much better if you changed one habit — and then discovered just how disconcerting such change can be. To create something new, you have to unmake yourself to some extent. And that can be tremendously difficult.
Freedom to act in the moment — the capacity to improvise — can liberate us, but it also terrifies us. We are often afraid of our own ability to change, our own agility. A friend who had gotten divorced said, “It’s easier to keep complaining about my mother, my ex-husband. Then I can avoid taking the risk of asking that man over there to dance with me.”
In artistic production, we become comfortable in our habitual styles and methods. We can stick to these patterns forever and stay assured that we know what we’re doing or that we are producing a product people approve of. This is how we can become pigeonholed by our own success. As Rilke wrote,
we’re left with yesterday’s
walk and the pampered loyalty of an old habit
that liked us so much it decided to stay, and never left.
For the monk who won’t let go of the image of his partner carrying the girl across the stream, learning the rules and sticking to them provides stability and clarity in this confusing life. This is how one should behave. This is how music is played. This is how sentences are written. “This,” quoting the mantra of many organizations, “is how we do it here.” The this is comfortable. We know what we are going to find there. Thus, we get stuck in conservatism and in doing as we’re told.
Stickiness is not only a matter of stasis or conservatism. We can be sticky to the need to innovate or to appear to be innovating. At a music festival I attended, a fine avant-garde percussionist produced virtuosic sounds from his snare drum, reveling in extended techniques, rubbing the drumhead with jeweler’s rouge, kitchen utensils, rubber balls, and plastic tubing. He got wonderfully elongated moaning sounds from the drum. Then his fingertip flicked out and hit the drumhead, making a classic snare drum stroke. It was clear from his face that he felt he had made a mistake. He had made a conventional snare drum sound and therefore wasn’t being original. He quickly covered this over with more activity, in the way musicians learn to distract attention from accidents. Was it uncreative to play a recognizable, traditional sound?
Bruce Lee, the great martial artist, developed what he called “the style of no style.” He was the first to do mixed martial arts, taking the best from all styles but not adhering to any particular school. Knowing about many disciplines, he would not be confined to any of them but do what was needed according to circumstance. Following the Tao Te Ching, he urged his students to be like water, yielding, shifting in form, able to penetrate everywhere.
• • •
Around 1660 Pascal said that the root of human unhappiness was our inability to sit still in a room. A recent series of studies showed that some people would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes sitting quietly alone. Men are more likely than women to prefer electric shock to stillness. People feel impelled to skitter around, searching for entertainment or conflict. From this discomfort we generate quarrels, wars, dramas domestic and political. If we are afraid to be alone with stillness and uncertainty, life will be an endless quest for in-flight entertainment. Suffering or feeling wounded can be a mighty entertaining distraction.
The neurologist Charles Limb recorded functional MRIs of the brains of musicians while they were improvising, then again while they were playing set compositions, and compared the two. The improvising brains showed a suppression of areas involved in critical judgment and fight-flight responses. People are afraid to be patient with their own creativity, to tolerate (and enjoy!) the ambiguity of exploration. Our impulse is to drown it out with criticism. We learn this habit early. I was in the hardware store looking for a tool. Next to me were a mother and her seven-year-old son. The boy picked up a strap wrench and excitedly told his mom about four interesting structures he could make with it. The mom dismissively explained to him why each one was not possible. I did not want to interfere, but I found a couple of his ideas remarkably good. The boy put down the wrench and stopped talking.
The critical faculty is vital — in its place. Edit a paragraph after you write it, not beforehand. Otherwise you will write nothing.
• • •
When thinking calms down, even a little bit, sound wakes up.
— William Allaudin Mathieu
In physics the term relaxation time refers to the return of a perturbed system to equilibrium. A weight hanging from a string is perturbed by you or me pushing it. Relaxation time is the interval required for the pendulum to stop swinging. If the pendulum is being pushed by you and me and other people, it will jiggle in many directions and take longer to stop. When a pendulum has finally come to rest, you can choose deliberately to poke it with your finger, imparting a clear, beautiful movement to it. If you poke it too soon, while the pendulum is still perturbed from its previous movements, the result will be random agitation.
In this pendulum we see the connection between effective improvising and contemplative practice, the mind in a meditative state versus the mind in a state of agitation.
Imagine the pendulum swinging, buffeted by forces that seem to come from the outside. Contemplative practice allows us time for that agitated system to settle down. We begin to listen, to our own voice as well as to outside sounds. Only then can we become active again, and from this calm, produce an improvised gesture. In doing so, we balance two seemingly opposite movements: acting without hesitation and remaining still long enough for perception to dilate and take in the unknown. With evenly hovering attention, we learn that our creative efforts, or our efforts in managing the problems of everyday life, are part of an interconnected system that cannot remain fixed and knowable.
• • •
Sticking is an activity. We do it, or hold back from doing it. F. M. Alexander discovered, by experimenting on himself, ways to recognize how we stiffen muscles, hold old patterns in place, and limit the good use of our body. He spoke of practicing inhibition, that is, recognizing the habit of sticking and choosing not to do it rather than feeling our pains and habits as impediments imposed from the outside. This practice became known as the Alexander Technique. Cultivating physical practices, athletic or artistic, or standing relaxed and alert like those Secret Service agents, we discover muscles that are addicted to perpetual contraction. Involuntary contractions of voluntary muscles represent energy that is wasted rather than focused on what we desire to do. As we sit still on the floor for fifteen minutes, tight leg muscles