It Helps to Be Able to Improvise
Sometimes, the best way through is to make it up as you go along.
When I began to learn melee combat in medieval fencing, a key phrase always stuck with me. No plan survives contact with the enemy. And it’s true. The “enemy”, be it a physical opponent or an intangible like Resistance, is unpredictable. You can’t and don’t know what they’ll do, how they’ll do it, or much of anything, really.
Part of this is because you are the only one inside your head, heart, and soul. But guess what? This is true for everyone. He’s the only one in his head, heart, and soul; she’s the only one in her head, heart, and soul; they’re the only one in their head, heart, and soul; and so on.
Just because the “enemy” has done the same thing 9 times in a row, the tenth time might be different. You expect a zag, they zig, and your plan goes straight to hell.
This can, will, and does happen all the time. That’s because, apart from what’s happening in your head, heart, and soul, you can do nothing for anyone or anything else. The weather, air pressure, attitude, and intent of this, that, or the other thing is unknown.
This truth makes some people crazy. Especially people who are thorough planners. What do you do? What can you do?
Enter improvisation. But I need to digress a moment.
Tactics versus strategy
Years of fencing in medieval melee has taught me a lot of important life lessons. One of the key lessons I’ve been quantifying over the last few years is the difference between strategy and tactic.
They’re frequently blended together, which makes sense because they tend to occur together. However, they are very different.
A strategy is the overarching plan. In combat, it’s looking at the enemy, what you know of their forces, how you expect them to act, and making a plan for how to take them on and win.
A tactic is what you apply in the field. As you carry out the strategic plan dialed down to the unit or the individual, you move in a way to meet what you are presented with. Hence, tactics tend to involve improvisation.
For example, during a fencing battle, my unit was assigned to meet the opposition and punch through. When we got to them, however, another ally was in the process of getting behind them. I changed my tactic, and my unit held the opposition in place to allow my ally to take care of them.
Since my unit survived this, I chose a new tactic within our overall strategy and found new opponents to face.
This is wholly applicable to intangibles as well as tangibles. When you have an idea to do “X”, and you strategize the plan to make it happen, as you begin to act on it, you might realize a different tactic will help you reach “X” more easily.
But how do you do that? This is where you improvise.
Learning to improvise is learning flexibility
The first important step is to recognize and acknowledge that no plan survives contact with the enemy. (Okay, yes, once in a while, your plan works as planned. But a complete, 100% success without at least some alteration is very, very rare in my experience.)
Once you accept this, you can improvise your tactics to meet the goals of your strategies. This can be done in a few different ways, featuring greater and lesser degrees of improvisation.
- Have multiple plans. You’ve probably heard of having a Plan A and a Plan B. Why not have a Plan C and a Plan D? Multiple plans leave you multiple options.
- Have multiple tactics. For the most part, there’s more than one way to get from here to there. The tactics for executing your plan can be many and varied. As the saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat (but please don’t. Cats are great.)
- Have multiple contingencies. This can be considered the plan within the plan. If you meet “A”, you do “X”. If you meet “B”, you do “Y”. And if you meet “C”, you do “Z”. There’s usually more than one way to do virtually anything and everything you can think of.
- Make it up as you go along. This is true improvisation. It requires flexibility, as you open yourself to do more than one thing and think it up, in the moment, on the spot.
Making it up as you go along is (I’ll bet this comes as no surprise) a matter of mindfulness.
Mindfulness to improvise
To improvise, you must be in the moment. Right here, right now. This requires a combination of situational awareness (knowing what’s going on around you) and self-awareness (knowing what’s going on in your head, heart, and soul). Full situational awareness requires self-awareness.
Back to a fencing analogy. Sometimes, in single combat, one-on-one fights, you have ropes to mark off your lists. Other times, you don’t. Either way, situational awareness is your mindfulness of the space around you and keeps you from running into the ropes or spectators. But that starts with awareness of who, what, where, how, and why you are. That’s self-awareness.
When you’re consciously aware of what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, your intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach, you can take actions mindfully. That’s how you do anything whatsoever with intent.
From this place of mindfulness – which only works in the present moment – you can assess your situation and make choices and decisions here and now. And that’s where and how you improvise.
This can be challenging because improvising is often spontaneous and unplanned. If you’re a planner, this is anathema to your way. However, the flexibility you gain when you learn to improvise affords you more choices and decisions, as well as means and ways out of difficult situations.
This takes practice, of course. The first step is accepting that you cannot plan for everything because you don’t control everything. Then, you need to work on letting go of the rigidity of making plans and embracing self-awareness and self-trust.
I should, however, mention an important caveat to all of this.
You will screw this up sometimes
When you improvise, it can be brilliant. It can also go spectacularly wrong. However, the same can be said of any and all plans, strategies, and tactics.
Nobody’s perfect. The truth is, everyone everywhere is perfectly imperfect. However, because of this, there’s no One True Way™ ever. And unless your fuck up gets you killed or imprisoned (ergo, a really big fuck up), you can make a new plan, try new strategies and tactics, and/or improvise something else.
While being able to improvise gives you added flexibility, it’s not a cure-all. But then, truth be told, there are no cure-alls. No magic pill exists to fix anything. Even scientifically designed medicines help your system do the work to fix things (and are not the actual fix).
Being able to improvise gives you a flexible tool you can use for both tangible and intangible matters. It helps to improvise because that can alleviate stress, help you be calmer and more centered, and open more ways to handle various planned or unplanned situations.
Finally, you are worthy and deserving of this most excellent tool. It takes practice, and even then, you might not succeed. But I, for one, love having the extra tools that improvisation on many levels allows me to employ.
Do you see how being able to improvise opens more paths in your life?
This is the six-hundred-eighty-eighth (688) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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