Learning to Improvise

Friends and acquaintances often describe me as easy-going; I can often "go with the flow" when it comes to plans and things of that nature.  What is interesting about this flexible mindset is just how uncomfortable I am when it comes to improvising or making things up as I go.  I often joke about being a first-born Virgo, and how that often leads me towards creating and following well-designed plans and processes.  What it has also led me towards is a real discomfort around the idea or ability to mix things up on the fly.  

I have noticed this aversion to improvisation in several areas of my life.  When I was taking piano lessons once, my teacher and I were working on a short duet that we were planning on performing at a recital.  She said that she would play the bass line and I could improvise above what she was playing.  I was like a deer in headlights feeling completely lost and bewildered.  I think my response went something like this "Improvise?  You mean just play random notes while you stick to the bass line?  But how would I know if I am doing it right????"  She laughed and reassured me that if I stuck to a certain group of notes, I basically couldn't NOT do it right.  In the end, I was able to put something together that actually did sound pretty great, but I was sweating buckets the entire time.  

Often while out on a run I will make course changes based on traffic lights or pedestrian traffic.  These have become more natural to me now, but when I first started to do this I often felt a pang of uncertainty.  If I changed direction mid-run how would I  know how far to go and in which direction?  What I eventually discovered is that improvising while on the run is actually a beautiful part of the experience, as it often leads to new discoveries and new destinations.  Maybe there is something to this whole improvisation thing after all.

More recently, I am realizing that as I continue to learn bass, improvisation is cropping its head up again.  Listening to great bass players it is hard to not notice that they often are filling in blanks in the music, and I am quite sure that a lot of what is being played is being figured out on the fly or at least was originally figured out off the cuff.  Back to that whole concern about going out on a limb and also doing it "right".  For someone like me, doing things the right way or in a way that would be pleasing to others has been a driving force behind a lot of what has taken place in my life.  Perfectionism and people pleasing have been instrumental in my personal inability to wing it sometimes, to experiment and take chances.  Although I have been somewhat adventurous in some areas of my life, I have also restricted my potential creativity by allowing the input and opinions of others to be a bigger factor than my own self expression.  I feel grateful to be in a place in my life now where this can start to change.

Learning to be brave and to put things out into the world that I am proud of will be both scary and empowering.  Finding moments where I can take chances and allow any and all outcomes to be teaching moments instead of moments of embarrassment or failure will make all of the nerves worthwhile.