The beauty of improvising as you get older is that you care less about errors and learn how to accept the misaligned as part of a larger view. You grow less impatient. Age allows you to let go of your youthful preoccupations. You are not so violently thrown around by your emotions. Emotional storms you can weather because you know you have lived through this before and you will probably live through it again. Improvising gives us the opportunity to seek freshness again and again, to ride through the old storms and find the new. It gives us the chance to discover, to dismantle habits and find the little parts of delight inside each action.
One of the interesting discoveries about aging is that if you allow it, then your life experience can change your attitude about yourself. If you can change your attitude, then you can never stop opening up. The challenge is to keep that in mind. So much of our lives depends on stability: stability of job, stability of home, stability of behavior, stability of self-identity, etc. Improvising allows us to break apart that fixed-ness. Life becomes an on-going expansion, where every little mistake transforms into another opportunity for growth.
We kill off play in our and our children’s lives so soon, educate them to be safer and take less risks. In this workshop, we learn to play again.