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Joy This is hard to force or express in a formula, but you should play with a sense of joy. We use the word “play” in improv deliberately. While committing and being invested and respecting the emotional truth, you should play with a sense of fun, or even mischief. UCB co-founder Matt Walsh taught a workshop once where he kept reminding us how ephemeral improv was. “This is disposable.” He kept urging us to make choices boldly and see what trouble it got us into. Our scenes became more energized and reckless.
How to Be the Greatest Improviser on Earth
Will Hines
I often found I had to be as much a psychiatrist as a neurologist. I had felt this strongly with my migraine patients, and I encountered it overwhelmingly with the postencephalitics, for they had a myriad of disorders both “neurologic” and “psychiatric”: parkinsonism, myoclonus, chorea, tics, strange compulsions, urges, obsessions, sudden “crises,” and gusts of passion. A purely neurological or a purely psychiatric approach with such patients would lead nowhere; the neurological and the psychiatric had to be conjoined.
An ecological model of culture underscores this advice: do nothing, because top-down interventions are generally harmful, and in their absence, attractive substitutes often evolve naturally. Almost the only rituals available to government bureaucracy are paperwork and sitting in offices (most of the criminal justice system is composed of these). In the absence of these weakly effective, often destructive, non-negotiable rituals, better rituals might evolve to solve various social problems. Doing nothing has never yet resulted in cane toads eating the entire world.
An Ecology of Beauty and Strong Drink
Sarah Perry
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