Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  When we look at Picasso drawing with light, or listen to Charlie Parker, what we really need to ask ourselves is this: are there areas in my life where I can further nurture and practise a particular craft or skill, so that I then feel liberated enough to improvise and be spontaneous? Just as scientists realised that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation, let’s not mythologise spontaneity in daily life as a realm of completely unrestrained and instinctive action that somehow comes out of nowhere. So if you are hankering after some carpe diem spontaneity, here’s a clear lesson: practise, practise, practise.

  EVERYTHING’S AN OFFER

  We might be prepared to practise a skill to the extent that we can eventually break free and act with Picasso-like spontaneity. But there’s a danger: what happens if all that practice – the proverbial 10,000 hours – turns us into an automaton enslaved by perfect technique and convention? We could find ourselves forever mechanically following the methods taught in a life drawing class, or never deviating from the recipe in the cookbook, or the strategic plan devised by the marketing department. How can we ensure that the spark of seize-the-day spontaneity remains alive in us, and that we maintain a creative approach to life?

  For hundreds of years creativity itself was thought to be a gift from God. In the sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari wrote about the ‘Divine Michelangelo’, who in all the major arts possesses ‘a perfect mastery that God has granted no other person, in the ancient or modern world, in all the years that the sun has been spinning round the world’.16 God began losing his monopoly on creative genius in the 1960s, when the first books on creativity techniques began to be published, such as Edward de Bono’s classic Lateral Thinking: A Textbook for Creativity. Today you can find shelves of books offering methods to cultivate creative potential, all of them based on the premise that creativity is as much a learned skill as a divine (or genetic) gift.17

  I believe in that premise but, in my view, if you are interested in nurturing your creativity and spontaneity, the best place to look for inspiration is neither in God nor a creativity guidebook, but in the theatre; specifically, in the improvisation techniques practised by actors. And even more specifically in a singular, electrifying idea: accept the offer. If there is an alchemical formula for spontaneous living, this may be it.

  I first discovered the idea of the offer in an improv class run by a friend of mine, the writer, activist and creativity coach John-Paul Flintoff. There were fifteen people in the workshop, none of us professional actors. Most said they were there in the hope that improv might free them from fears, or make them more spontaneous, or just because it looked fun. It was a completely exhilarating – and often confronting – experience. We began with a hilarious exercise where we paired up with someone who spoke a language we didn’t know. Person A started speaking in the language B was unfamiliar with, and B had to copy exactly what A was saying, speaking their words at precisely the same time. My partner talked to me in Mandarin. He began slowly while I tried to mirror the unfamiliar vowel sounds and tone inflections, my words clumsily overlapping his. After a few minutes I got into it, and found myself reciting an ancient Chinese poem in the original language (though not understanding a word of it, of course). For the next exercise, we split into teams where our task was to speak to each other without using the letter S. At first this activity seemed to freeze our brains and made it impossible to say anything at all, but it eventually led to engaging conversations marked, admittedly, by some unusual turns of phrase (‘How old might your male child be?’ or ‘Would your abode happen to be near the park where Diana the female prince once lived?’). It was like tapping into an unused and rather rusty part of your linguistic intelligence.

  All this was really a warm-up to shake us out of shyness and self-consciousness. The turning point was when John-Paul introduced the idea of the offer with the help of a deceptively simple game called ‘Presents’. Again we split into pairs. Person A held out both hands and gave B an imaginary gift. B’s role was to accept the gift offered to them, interpret what it was and respond to it. It was fun once we got the hang of it. So A might hold their arms out wide, and B would take the present with complete joy. B might then put it on, pretending it was a clown suit. B would then offer a present to A, perhaps cupped in her hands. Person A unpacks it, winds it up and follows it around the floor – it’s a mechanical mouse. What made Presents work was not just accepting the gift with enthusiasm, but also making the gift we received as interesting as possible.

  This exercise, as John-Paul explained, was originally devised by one of the gurus of theatrical improvisation, Keith Johnstone, when he was teaching at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the 1950s. What’s really going on in Presents? Anything an actor does, Johnstone calls an ‘offer’. Each offer can be either accepted or blocked. Scenes spontaneously generate themselves, according to Johnstone, if both actors offer and accept alternately. The game Presents is about encouraging us to accept an offer and work with it. In his book Impro, Johnstone gives an example of a failed improvised scene from one of his acting classes:

  A: I’m having trouble with my leg.

  B: I’m afraid I’ll have to amputate.

  A: You can’t do that, Doctor.

  B: Why not?

  A: Because I’m rather attached to it.

  B: (Losing heart) Come, man.

  A: I’ve got this growth on my arm too, Doctor.

  The scene fizzles out because A blocks B when he says, ‘You can’t do that, Doctor’. The action is unable to develop in a free and spontaneous way. Johnstone then had the same actors replay the scene, but this time making sure to accept rather than block the offers:

  A: Augh!

  B: Whatever is it, man?

  A: It’s my leg, Doctor.

  B: This looks nasty. I shall have to amputate.

  A: It’s the one you amputated last time, Doctor.

  B: You mean you’ve got a pain in your wooden leg?

  A: Yes, Doctor.

  B: You know what this means?

  A: Not woodworm, Doctor!

  B: Yes. We’ll have to remove it before it spreads to the rest of you.

  (A’s chair collapses)

  B: My God! It’s spreading to the furniture!18

  Here the scene works because the actors have discovered the art of accepting the offer. It’s dynamic, it’s spontaneous, it’s funny, it flows. The actors are responding to and embracing what’s alive in the other person.

  For Johnstone, learning to accept the offer is a lesson that extends far beyond the acting workshop. ‘In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action,’ he writes. ‘There are people who prefer to say “Yes”, and there are people who prefer to say “No”. Those who say “Yes” are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say “No” are rewarded by the safety they attain. There are far more “No” sayers around than “Yes” sayers.’19 So most of us spend much of our lives blocking rather than accepting the offers that come our way. Johnstone’s ideas ask us to identify the parts of our lives where we tend to block, and to consider accepting the offers instead.

  How might we put this all into practice? A compelling response comes from Robert Poynton, an innovative thinker about creativity and communication in organisations who has spent fifteen years working with Johnstone’s improvisation approach.

  Poynton’s key idea is this: Everything’s an Offer.

  This foundational principle contains three components: Notice More, Let Go, and Use Everything.20 Notice More is about heightening our levels of awareness so we don’t spend so much time on automatic pilot, letting potential offers pass us by. If you’re listening to someone speak, what can you pick up from their intonation or the pauses in their speech? Are the walls of the room really white or – if you look closely – actually grey or tinged with blue? Can you hear a musical note in the humming of the office photocopier (and maybe sing along)? This kind of mindful attention primes us for creativity. We need to notice mor
e of our immediate environment by opening up our senses, or as Poynton puts it, ‘Can you learn to love the corner of your eye?’21

  Next comes letting go. This is about jettisoning our assumptions, inhibitions and fear of judgment from others. Typically it requires making ourselves vulnerable. When I did the first activity at the improv workshop I felt self-conscious and it held me back. But once I sat down, I realised that nobody was judging me or really cared whether I was ‘good’ at speaking mock Chinese. We have to let go of those people who we imagine might be looking over our shoulder. They’re probably not even there.

  The third element – and this is the part I find most liberating – is the advice to Use Everything. We should recognise that everything we notice around us, and everything that happens to us, is a potential spark we can use for spontaneous living and thinking. We are surrounded by an abundance of offers. Here’s an example. I was recently walking around Sydney Harbour, thinking about the structure of this book. Then I remembered to Use Everything. Looking around me, I noticed the long single-curved span of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which made me wonder if the book had a sufficiently strong single narrative arc running through it. I then turned toward the nearby Opera House, which prompted a different thought: each chapter could be viewed as the sail of a boat, but it was no problem if those sails were of different shapes and sizes – they could work together harmoniously to help the boat sail forward. And I suddenly realised that I wanted the book to be more like the Opera House than the Harbour Bridge.

  Once we become adept at using everything, it also becomes possible to reinterpret negative events as potential offers, transforming them into possibilities for new kinds of action. It could be the budget that’s just been cut, or the rainy day that stops you going to the park with your kids but turns into an opportunity for an indoor craft fest. When the director Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi, he was short of proper lighting equipment. But he turned this obstacle to his advantage, using it to give the film its trademark moody feel.22 Groucho Marx, who was famously skilled at using everything, was once faced with a contestant in a quiz show who ‘froze’, so he took the man’s pulse and remarked, ‘Either this man’s dead or my watch has stopped.’23

  Put together Notice More, Let Go, and Use Everything and you get improv: a spontaneous approach to life based on an attitude that Everything’s An Offer. For me, it’s epitomised by the time I was giving a workshop in a prison and suddenly abandoned my plan. I noticed the inmates drawing the discussion away from my planned topic, I decided to let go of my desire to control the structure of the session, and I used everything in the sense that I created an improvised workshop led by the ideas and energy of the prisoners. The difficult moment when I realised that they were talking with great enthusiasm about issues that were not on my agenda (such as the psychology of trust) was an offer there for the taking. Was I going to block it or embrace it? I chose the latter and it turned out to be one of the most interesting, rewarding and thought-provoking workshops I’ve ever done. One of the inmates came up to me afterwards and said, ‘That was the most intelligent conversation I’ve had in the last three years.’ Sure, it was a little chaotic at times, but this was a small price to pay for the freedom it unleashed.

  This improv approach to living is, on one level, rather naïve. Everything is not an offer. A miscarriage is not an offer, it’s a tragedy. Being sacked from your job is not an offer, except in rare circumstances. And it would be unwise, even reckless, to say ‘Yes’ to every possibility that comes our way. When I’m at the final stages of writing a book, I choose to say ‘No’ to nearly everything – I go into lockdown and rarely leave the house. But we need not reduce the idea of the offer to a cult of positive thinking that considers every occurrence a magical opportunity that must be grasped. We don’t need to seize every offer. What we can do, however, is to notice those parts of our lives where we receive lots of offers and usually block them. Is it at work or home or with friends? Are we doing it more often as we get older? What underlies our kneejerk blocking? And then we might experiment with embracing a few more offers.

  Improv encourages us, like Shakespeare, to see the world as a stage on which we act out our lives, while challenging the idea that our roles are fixed. Do we always want to stick to the lines we’ve rehearsed and the stories about ourselves we know so well? Or might it be time to throw away the script?

  THE PLAN IS THERE IS NO PLAN

  Opening ourselves to the offers around us might sound good in theory, but in practice we could still feel hemmed in by schedules, deadlines and routines. How can we seize the day when the diary is so full and the To Do list unending? Perhaps there’s a simple solution to it all: move to Spain, or even better to Brazil.

  When I lived in Madrid, I had a much more effervescent spur-of-the-moment existence than when I lived in north London. My Spanish flatmates would suddenly decide at midnight to go out to a flamenco bar, or on Friday afternoon suggest that we all head off to the mountains for the weekend. Even conversation felt charged with spontaneity: meals were invariably accompanied by heated and passionate arguments about the merits of Almodóvar’s films, the ethics of bullfighting, or whose turn it was to clean the bathroom. I’ve never lived so intensely or had such little sleep. It was as if I was in Hemingway’s novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, where the characters continually throw themselves into impulsive drinking sessions, wild parties and reckless love affairs in an effort to live their lives ‘all the way up’.24

  Brazil is even better known for spontaneous living than Spain.25 There’s the dancing and music everywhere you go, the vibrant street life and the carnival tradition. It’s a culture that extends from the spontaneous emotion with which people greet each other to the improvised housing of the urban poor in the favelas of the big cities, where DIY dwellings are swiftly constructed with any material to hand. Spontaneity is most clearly visible in the way people change their social plans at the last minute, and defy scheduled living by being late for almost everything (a trait that can be rather frustrating for clock-watching foreigners). ‘Hey, stay for a drink,’ someone once said to me in Rio. I replied that unfortunately I had to leave as I had to give a lecture. ‘It doesn’t matter if you start a bit late,’ he countered, ‘relax, everything will be fine!’ Time feels different in Brazil, somehow slower and more malleable. The lack of hold that timetables and deadlines have on daily life is evident from a survey of thirty-one countries revealing that Brazil ranks twenty-sixth for the accuracy of its public clocks (Switzerland comes first and El Salvador last).26

  Some of this spontaneity may be a myth, an idealised picture painted by those living in less vibrant and more strictured societies who are yearning for a sense of freedom and escape. Not every Brazilian is a carpe diem virtuoso: people from the south of Brazil are known for being much less carefree and more focused on turning up to meetings on time than their northern counterparts.27 And the young bankers I’ve met in São Paolo are as stressed and trapped by routine as any I’ve met in New York or London. Still, it is worth exploring whether there are any clear lessons we might draw from Brazilian culture for escaping the constraints of hyper-scheduled living.

  It is difficult to dissect a culture as a whole, so I want to examine one specific element of Brazilian society that is renowned for exhibiting spontaneity, and which has been subject to detailed study by sociologists and anthropologists. I’m talking, of course, about football.

  Brazilian football has long had a reputation for its spontaneity, flamboyance and flair. As early as 1945, the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre noted that the national football style was distinct from the European approach ‘through a conjunction of qualities of surprise, guile, astuteness, swiftness, and at the same time the brilliance of individual spontaneity’.28 It was not so much a sport as an art, characterised by sublime feints and improbable acrobatic shots for goal. In the 1960s and 1970s, the individual genius of players like Pelé stood in stark contrast to the machine-like effi
ciency of the German national team or the dour English who dropped their most exciting and talented player, striker Jimmy Greaves, from the 1966 World Cup final team in favour of the much more dependable and workmanlike Geoff Hurst. England may have won the cup that year, but Brazil’s World Cup wins in 1958, 1962 and 1970 seemed to confirm the triumph of Dionysian spontaneity over the technocratic approach of European sides with their clever offside traps and tactical negativity. As the Uruguayan intellectual Eduardo Galeano wrote, in the 1970 World Cup, ‘Brazil played football worthy of her people’s yearning for celebration and craving for beauty’.29

  So what was the secret of Brazilian football? The general consensus amongst the experts is that its spontaneous energy was due not so much to the style promoted by particular coaches and managers, as to the place of the game in Brazilian society. Football became a popular pastime in the early twentieth century, mainly played by blacks (Afro-Brazilians), people of mixed race and the poor. In a country riven by racism and inequality, and where employment prospects were determined more by social contacts than ability or qualifications, it was seen as a rare oasis of democracy and equality of opportunity. Through the sheer demonstration of individual talent on the field, it was possible to make your way in the world – at least more so than in many other realms of life. This is what drove the style of Brazilian football, where players made an effort for their individuality to shine.30

  In other words, the character of Brazilian football is rooted in historically specific factors related to the country’s economic and social heritage, which cannot be easily replicated. The ‘Brazilian way’, such that there is a way (and some would dispute this today, noting that in the last two decades Brazilian teams have played defensive, even boring football), is much more a matter of circumstance and context than deliberate design.31 And this goes for other aspects of spontaneity in Brazilian culture, such as the carnival tradition, the centrality of music and dance, and the relatively freewheeling attitude to time. Social scientists argue that these are rooted in myriad factors ranging from the legacy of colonial slavery to the adoption of African musical forms, from the impact of Catholicism and indigenous culture to the highly stratified nature of wealth inequality based on centuries of unequal land distribution. The tropical climate plays a role in it too.32