What in the World Will They Think Of Next?

July 20, 2011

What item would you reproduce if you could?

Technology is progressing at such a pace that it almost feels as though anything is possible. Aside from machines not yet able to produce human babies, what do you think is totally impossible for machines to create?

Watch this short video for something that was completely unimaginable when I was born. Well, that was an awfully long time ago, so let’s say that it probably wasn’t thought possible when you were born either.

I am particularly interested in this video for two reasons.

First, I am always fascinated with factory tours. I love to see how things are made. Maybe that’s because I’m technically challenged, or maybe I just like to know more about how the world works.

And I am particularly pleased with the video because I had a personalize tour of this contraption several years ago by my son-in-law, who is one of the engineers there. Absolutely great to see these machines up close.

However, the second reason I was glad to see the video is because they didn’t have the capacity to scan in a tool or other item. As I understand it, they had to have an engineer write a program for the “printer” to read.

The one thing they don’t mention is the cost. This is unlikely to be a home device for a very long time. But then, they said that about the first computers, didn’t they?

Wednesday’s Rorschach Test

April 6, 2011

Where can you see humor?

When I came back from my conference last week (and a visit with delightful granddaughters), I discovered a major problem with my email that took hours and dollars to fix. This week I’m getting organized with several upcoming online events in which I’m participating (will tell you about them closer to the time they will happen).

That means that today I am trying to find a quick way to post something to the blog so that you won’t think I’ve fallen in a hole.

After putting on my thinking cap for a minute, I decided to give you a mid-week break with what I used to call “Rorschach Tests” on another website.  Now, I think I will periodically include some of these in the blog. It should give you a light moment (we all need those once-in-awhile) and can keep the blog up-to-date with new material.

For those of you who haven’t been psychoanalyzed or may have forgotten the definition of a Rorschach Test, it is an inkblot with no single or “right” interpretation. Apparently the answer the patient gives to the doctor (usually a psychiatrist) indicates the depths or disturbance of one’s mind. An old joke tells of a man who was given a series of Rorschach inkblots and each time he said they reminded him of sex. “Well,” said the doctor, “it sounds as though you have sex on your mind a great deal.” “Me?”, the patient replied. “You’re the one with all the dirty pictures, doc.”

In any case, the “Rorschach Tests” I’ll include in the blog are simply cartoons I’ve used over the years for the fun of it (plus new ones I’ve gathered along the way). The caption or “meaning” you give to any particular cartoon might offer a deep and penetrating analysis of your psyche. On the other hand, it could simply demonstrate a quirk of mind that enjoys the ability of an artist to produce something that resonates with your funny bone.

When you look at this cartoon, consider three things.

What happened before this scene?

What is happening now?

What will happen next?

Have a great day. As you look around you, what else offers you a chance to make an interpretation (hopefully a humorous one) just for the fun of it?

Are You a “Quick Change” Artist?

February 4, 2011

Living in a time of fast-change requires us to flow with what is happening while participating in the creation of a new and better world.

“Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. And there’s no such thing as an ordinary moment.”— Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, RMT, CGP: cabaret performer, actress, singer, comedian, therapist, etc. and today’s guest blogger

Last March, I took an all-day workshop on improvisation at a conference in Washington, DC, put on by the Psychotherapy Networker Magazine. Jude Treder-Wolff led us through several exercises that opened our minds to the potential for seeing new possibilities in familiar situations. Wells Hanley, who is a free-lance musician, played wonderfully original compositions that matched what we were creating in the moment.

I asked her if she would write some articles I could use in the blog and newsletter. She graciously gave me three, of which this is the first.

As the daily news demonstrates, the world is going through a period of extreme uneasiness and our daily lives reflect that uncertainty. Learning to adjust to constant new realities is a great skill and this article can help you find a new balance in a world out of balance.

I had originally called this post “Are You a Quick Change Artist?.” Then I decided I liked the title Treder-Wolff suggested because it reflects a statement she makes (see bold paragraph below) that there is “no box to think out of anymore.”

Especially if you are one of a growing number of “free-lancers and independent contractors” that Treder-Wolff mentions, I recommend you find a local improvisation group you can join. Trust me, you don’t need to be an actor to have a great time learning to shift from moment to moment in order to enjoy yourself as the situation sifts and you learn to adjust to new circumstances.

Arlene Harder, MA, MFT

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Improvisation Matters: Uncertainty is the “New Normal”

For the third time since it opened Off-Broadway, I recently saw The 39 Steps – in which 4 actors play multiple roles within the same scene and sometimes in the same sentence – to tell a complex spy story based on an early Alfred Hitchcock film. Balancing slapstick comedy with communication of important details about the serious throughline, the cast displays a seemingly infinite capacity to switch gears – and hats and identities, including accents – with split-second timing, and to use the same objects in a thousand different ways.

Using a few set pieces -e.g. chairs, boxes, flashlights – and the actors’ physical commitment to the scene, we experience a chase atop a moving train, a car, a Scottish farmhouse on the windy moors, and the London Palladium among many others. This hilarious and inventive show expresses a world of ideas about improvisation in the real world when so many of us are having to adapt to changes we never anticipated would complicate our lives, and make the most out of existing resources.

These actors’ ability to move in and out of various identities is a “quick-change” skill developed and expanded through training in improvisation and theater games. And as actors on the stage of 21st century life, in which uncertainty is the “new normal,” we need exactly that kind of creative competence and rapid-response mental agility to meet all sorts of unpredictable pressures and demands. Of all the experiential methods I have studied over the past 25 years – which include music therapy, theater, psychodrama, and writing – improvisation emerges as the most effective match for the urgency, pace of change and unique challenges of life in these times.

Technology has dissolved the old boundaries of time and space, there is no box to think out of anymore, and in today’s world mental health has more to do with our capacity to connect with an increasingly complex social world, manage uncertainty and exploit the opportunities for growth and expansion within the unpredictable and unfamiliar than it does with symptom reduction. Improvisation accomplishes this and more with a generous dose of humanity, humor, and warmth.

The May/June 2010 issue of the Ivey Business Journal promotes music and theater improvisation as a way to “learn a great deal about flexibility and agility in the face of ambiguity and time pressure. Consider jazz musicians, who jam, or work collaboratively to co-create music in real time. Or consider the theatre improviser who doesn’t have a script but creates the storyline with the other improvisers. The improvisers have learned to deal with diversity, ambiguity, interconnectedness and flux.”

As free-lancers and independent contractors progressively make up more and more of the workforce – recently estimated at 35% with business leaders predicting this trend will continue–rapidly evolving technologies and seismic economic and social shifts are redefining the rules and the structures through which we create our professional lives. With uncertainty as the new normal, improvisers have a significant advantage as we live through this great reshaping of the way things work.

The mind and skill set gained through improvisation-based training is ideally matched to meet intensifying demands for innovative and inventive thinking on the fly, the ability to break down barriers to people across a wide range of social and cultural gaps, reach for resources and search for hidden connections linking “what is” to “what is emerging,” to new directions and inventive solutions that are the mark of innovation.

RELATED ARTICLES:

• Evidence of a Mind-Body Connection
• Explaining a Spiritual Connection
• The Marvelous Gift of Resting

A Story Short and Simple(minded)

July 15, 2010

What story can you create from random words?

If you have read the last post, Ode to Clever Writing or Committing Random Acts of Silliness, you will understand why I have created this for absolutely no purpose other than to have fun.

I began with a Reader’s Digest from a subscription that my in-laws sent us for decades. I placed a number of them in a basket in the living room where I periodically looked at them for some of their great jokes. So after writing about the Take-a-Break on which the last post was based, I decided I wouldn’t ask my readers to do something I wasn’t willing to try and so used the words on the cover of the June 1996 edition to write the story I share today.

I didn’t use quite all the words, but here are the words from which I had to choose (ignoring words like “the”, “an” and “we):

$100, airwaves, away, baby, bank, best, blind, book, born, box, campus, case, cause, China, chip, comedy, courage, cowboys, cyclone, dared, dream, driving, drunk, edge, elephant, flatten, forever, fun, giveaway, gold, rush, good, great, heroes, June, jury, kill, laughter, license, lies, life, little, medicine, men, news, over, patient, ponder, points, race, reason, report, ripping, room, Pacific, Reader’s Digest, Russia, section, sky, special, stealing, swords, Tahquitz Canyon, today, tools, trapped, trust, tummy, twice, United States, universe, verbal, widely, women, world

Here’s what I did with the above words to contribute to the furtherance of periodic silliness.

June was like many women who wanted more in life than leaving her college campus, having a little baby and living at the edge of town in a neat little house. She’d feel forever trapped if she settled for a job as teller in a bank or worker on an assembly line where she would be one of many workers who had to pack a box with potato chips as quickly as possible so her company could win the race for corporate profits. She didn’t want to live with no greater goal than checking her mailbox to see if she’d won a $100 giveaway contest.

No, she was born for a different reason. She dared to dream that her life had a greater cause than hoping she could flatten her tummy and have a great figure.

And then one day, as she was halfheartedly watching the news on television, she didn’t pay much attention to the story about a cyclone building in the Pacific, or about the report that men from Russia were supposedly telling lies and stealing swords, or about a jury that had just found someone guilty of twice trying to kill a blind man who ran a book store, or even in the story about the pilot from China who claimed a plane from the United States didn’t have a license to fly in that section of the sky.

But she did pay attention when she heard a report about an escaped elephant that some cowboys had cornered in Tahquitz Canyon way out west. The image of that scene caught her fancy and she continued to ponder the situation in the next few days. Finally, she remembered a contest in the “Drama in Real Life” section of Reader’s Digest and thought the story about the courage of the cowboys would make a ripping good tale of heroes. But then she remembered that some of the cowboys were drunk and that got her to thinking how much laughter she could create if she wrote a comedy book about the cowboy’s world today, which is a lot different than it was during the gold rush, what with elephants and city slickers driving their SUVs across the prairie.

June realized that it would be fun to become a writer and use her special verbal skills. She was determined to trust her instincts and become a great writer, or at least have a good time trying. For the first time in her life she felt right about her place in the universe.

What would you do with the words from the cover of any magazine? Send me your creations is you’d like.