...From an objective perspective is very difficult, or even trying to appreciate it from the subjective perspective of a potential audience member or consumer, "if I were stumbling upon this, how would I react?" and I think if you're goal is to create good work, as opposed to work that's explicitly commercial (nothing wrong with that) the main question should be "is this something I would enjoy?"
But of course, you want other people to enjoy it too, and probably if you and your friends have a long list of convoluted inside jokes that have taken on various lives of their own inside and out of their original contexts hearing them parroted back and forth would be entertaining, it would sound like a conversation between you and your friends. Which is not an unworthy goal for something like a Podcast (that by the way is what I'm going to be talking about, get ready) to make something that sounds like an authentic and fun conversation between friends, because doing that is actually pretty difficult, especially doing it in such a way that would be compelling and entertaining to an outside listener.
I've been gradually realizing things like this throughout the process of editing down the recording session of July 22nd, going through various incarnations, finding what works, whittling things down, removing the pauses, adding background music, mixing, etc, etc and now listening to what I'm calling the finished product (while resisting the urge to go back and fix this bit of mixing or cut that piece of dead air I'd missed before) and trying to decide for my self "is this good?" Well yeah actually, for a first attempt ever at this medium, I'd say it's pretty good but then "really how good is it?" my id asks my ego or whatever model we use for the voices in our heads that doubt.
(Side note, I actually spoke to my Mom about it, and even though she's my Mom so of course she did she said she liked it, and specifically the bits I'm going to get into in a moment of a more philosophical nature. This actually made me happier than she probably realized, because I believe that if you can make something which appeals to 60 something baby boomers and people in your peer group, or any wide audience like that, you are really truly doing something right.)
Something I didn't do which is my goal in future recording sessions was to respond from a completely earnest, thoughtful and honest place (as myself, basically). Something that I tend to do in improv/comedy stuff is make a game of tossing curveballs at my partner, which is something I did a lot during our recording session. Like if someone is doing something to enhance the atmosphere of the scene, or has allowed a changed in their character or given circumstances based on a failed communication (like if you, my theoretical scene partner, or I establish one thing, say we're partners in a detective agency but then one of us changes it to make us siblings which doesn't break the scene but inexplicably changes it pointing that out or whatever) or even when something like that hasn't happened, just to see how the other person reacts.
As audience members, we get served that a lot in our contemporary "absurdist" comedy in the vein of Tim & Eric or much of the current Adult Swim programming block, and it's a perfectly valid aesthetic which is much easier to pull off than something like Louie which is completely dependent on the strength of Louis C.K's actual point of view on things as refracted through a semi realist depiction of his world and real life. Doing absurdist comedy well sounds easy but is difficult, depictions of life and adding to them the lens or angle of a specific comedic viewpoint sounds difficult but is actually nigh impossible.
And then again, at this moment I'm focusing on film and television, which is what I'm working on, I'm working on a podcast. In that respect, let's say two analogues entities to the Tim and Eric/Louis paradigm might be Comedy Bang Bang and WTF with Marc Maron, two extremely popular very different podcasts. Comedy Bang Bang sets it self as an interview show, and then becomes absurd (and is one of my primary inspirations for the model I'm trying to work out) and WTF is actually an interview show, which oftentimes becomes as much about it's host and his weird and compellingly specific world view as it does about the person he's interviewing. In the case of Comedy Bang Bang it works because usually all involved are world class improvisors who've been doing it in various forms for years and years, and have had a while to develop the specific voice of their show and Marc Maron is an incredibly compelling interviewer and for that other stuff he draws on 20 plus years of life as a stand up comedian and more than that as a thoughtful but doubting human being. Really, you should just go listen to them to see what I'm talking about.
Anyway, in response to those two archetypes, tons and tons of imitators have inevitably sprung up. One of my favorites from the WTF mold is You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes, which has much of the same structure as WTF where Holmes talks to a guest about his or her career in show business or whatever but often spirals off into very heady discussions about sex or religion or whatever.
I'd like to think that where my goal had been to do something purely resembling Comedy Bang Bang with just lots of comedy bits and improvised sketch type things (which are present in the pilot) we added up going into a lot of You Made it Weird-esque territory, and I actually kind of like that, but doubt my own ability to consistently make something like that work.
But at the same time, what am I gaining by doubting myself? I've only done one of these, and it developed organically and in the process of my editing it into this particular thing, next time will probably be something different and the time after that. And the reason why I'm trying this out is to scratch that creative itch to be making my own stuff that I've blogged about, and to just start learning how to do this thing. Certainly none of the podcast people I admire were doing their shows at the level they do them over night, no one does that, it takes time and practice and dedication. Well, right now I've got some time, so let's see how long I can keep this dedication going and where it takes me.
Showing posts with label being in the moment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label being in the moment. Show all posts
Monday, July 30, 2012
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Blogging My Movements
I would say I've gotten pretty good about consistently blogging lately, wouldn't you? Nod and say yes. Well done. Well, I'm sipping my iced coffee with a few minutes before I have to run off to our all day tech rehearsal for R&G so why don't I take a moment to blog a bit, yes? Yes.
This was my last blog post. You didn't read it, because I didn't post it to Facebook. What we ended up doing in Yo-el's class was some more of the Laban work, and the observation stuff I talked about didn't end up coming in to play. However, the Laban work has been helpful, although I feel like I'm only scratching the surface of it. I did have one meaningful "moment" in that particular class. Towards the end of the "Breakfast Warm Up" cycle that Yo-el has been teaching us, we do what he calls a "Pinnochio" where you basically skip across the room on a diagonal in small groups. He encouraged us to open up to this exercise, as I interpreted it to let go of our cynicism and adult doubts and be more child like and joyful. So I did that. I really did. I dropped my tension, my self awareness, and just went with the movement. And then when Yo-el noticed this and encouraged me to continue, my self awareness came back and I was a little less in it. Oh well! It's funny how even simple praise can create self awareness, isn't it? Because then you're stuck in this feedback loop of trying to recreate that moment of praise instead of making a new one for yourself. More on that later.
Friday we didn't have movement, which I didn't find out until I arrived at the BCA due to a communication error. But they were very accommodating, and instead I was able to sit in on a Linklater voice class with a local actress named Melissa Baroni who Jennie Israel had previously recommended as someone to study with. Linklater is a particular school of thought about breath and voice work that's taught at Shakespeare and Company where Jennie studied as did a bunch of ASP associated people and various Boston actors. This class was actually also made available to me as part of the Commonwealth thing I'm doing, but due to my schedule it didn't seem like it would work out and I feel like movement is more of a priority to my work right now. However it was very informative and enlightening, and I discovered a sense of my breath that I hadn't felt before... a sense of connection, of being in my breath within my body (as opposed to being in my head, which I've been trying to get out of by doing all this work) that was sort of an epiphany.
Saturday was movement again! And the beginning of our work with Jerzy Gratowski techniques, who was this cool Polish theater director and you should Google him. Previously, I'd done exercises inspired by Gratowski with Tommy Derrah (who unsurprisingly knows Yo-el) and found them kind of incredible in their power and energy with a large group. What we did on Saturday was called the River and was much more of an intimate exercise with a group of four, where one at a time we take up the energy of the "river" which in this case begins in one of part of the body and emanates throughout, inspiring movement in different body parts which the observers then followed. When I went up the first time for what was to be a minute with the river, it started in my knee and I followed it as it pulled up around in the space. I've found in my movement work, my poor sense of balance and coordination limits me from moving in the ways that my imagination would dictate, especially in the way that I want to escape what I find to be the more pedestrian levels of our everyday standing posture. So I'm always trying to get down low or high or at a diagonal and immediately I'm off balance. With this exercise I was able to accept that, and ultimately I was brought to the floor where I find myself less restricted by gravity and was able to embrace the inner chaos I was feeling in that moment, to the point of nearing what seemed like could have been self injury had I continued when Yo-el ended the exercise after what felt like 20 or 30 seconds, instead of a minute.
Afterwards, Yo-el commented that it was the most "out of my head" that he had seen me move, and inside of course I blushed a little, and he encouraged me to continue exploring in that direction. But how!? Now that I was aware that I'd been out of my head, I would be in my head trying to get back to that place. I was aware of that conundrum when we started the exercise a second time for two minutes. Instead of feeling violent and chaotic in my movements, I found a sensuality, exploring the feeling of my own body, the floor and of my breath. Instead of feeling like 30 seconds, it felt longer than two minutes, like three or four. We didn't talk about it aftewards, but we made eye contact and I felt Yo-el gave me a thumbs up. And I give myself a thumbs up too, because I don't think I fell into that trap of trying to recreate my own energy.
I'd hoped to tackle the challenges and joys of this tech week, but now I need to get to tech rehearsal! Until then bloggers!
This was my last blog post. You didn't read it, because I didn't post it to Facebook. What we ended up doing in Yo-el's class was some more of the Laban work, and the observation stuff I talked about didn't end up coming in to play. However, the Laban work has been helpful, although I feel like I'm only scratching the surface of it. I did have one meaningful "moment" in that particular class. Towards the end of the "Breakfast Warm Up" cycle that Yo-el has been teaching us, we do what he calls a "Pinnochio" where you basically skip across the room on a diagonal in small groups. He encouraged us to open up to this exercise, as I interpreted it to let go of our cynicism and adult doubts and be more child like and joyful. So I did that. I really did. I dropped my tension, my self awareness, and just went with the movement. And then when Yo-el noticed this and encouraged me to continue, my self awareness came back and I was a little less in it. Oh well! It's funny how even simple praise can create self awareness, isn't it? Because then you're stuck in this feedback loop of trying to recreate that moment of praise instead of making a new one for yourself. More on that later.
Friday we didn't have movement, which I didn't find out until I arrived at the BCA due to a communication error. But they were very accommodating, and instead I was able to sit in on a Linklater voice class with a local actress named Melissa Baroni who Jennie Israel had previously recommended as someone to study with. Linklater is a particular school of thought about breath and voice work that's taught at Shakespeare and Company where Jennie studied as did a bunch of ASP associated people and various Boston actors. This class was actually also made available to me as part of the Commonwealth thing I'm doing, but due to my schedule it didn't seem like it would work out and I feel like movement is more of a priority to my work right now. However it was very informative and enlightening, and I discovered a sense of my breath that I hadn't felt before... a sense of connection, of being in my breath within my body (as opposed to being in my head, which I've been trying to get out of by doing all this work) that was sort of an epiphany.
Saturday was movement again! And the beginning of our work with Jerzy Gratowski techniques, who was this cool Polish theater director and you should Google him. Previously, I'd done exercises inspired by Gratowski with Tommy Derrah (who unsurprisingly knows Yo-el) and found them kind of incredible in their power and energy with a large group. What we did on Saturday was called the River and was much more of an intimate exercise with a group of four, where one at a time we take up the energy of the "river" which in this case begins in one of part of the body and emanates throughout, inspiring movement in different body parts which the observers then followed. When I went up the first time for what was to be a minute with the river, it started in my knee and I followed it as it pulled up around in the space. I've found in my movement work, my poor sense of balance and coordination limits me from moving in the ways that my imagination would dictate, especially in the way that I want to escape what I find to be the more pedestrian levels of our everyday standing posture. So I'm always trying to get down low or high or at a diagonal and immediately I'm off balance. With this exercise I was able to accept that, and ultimately I was brought to the floor where I find myself less restricted by gravity and was able to embrace the inner chaos I was feeling in that moment, to the point of nearing what seemed like could have been self injury had I continued when Yo-el ended the exercise after what felt like 20 or 30 seconds, instead of a minute.
Afterwards, Yo-el commented that it was the most "out of my head" that he had seen me move, and inside of course I blushed a little, and he encouraged me to continue exploring in that direction. But how!? Now that I was aware that I'd been out of my head, I would be in my head trying to get back to that place. I was aware of that conundrum when we started the exercise a second time for two minutes. Instead of feeling violent and chaotic in my movements, I found a sensuality, exploring the feeling of my own body, the floor and of my breath. Instead of feeling like 30 seconds, it felt longer than two minutes, like three or four. We didn't talk about it aftewards, but we made eye contact and I felt Yo-el gave me a thumbs up. And I give myself a thumbs up too, because I don't think I fell into that trap of trying to recreate my own energy.
I'd hoped to tackle the challenges and joys of this tech week, but now I need to get to tech rehearsal! Until then bloggers!
Monday, June 11, 2012
Au Revoir Tuzenbach
And with this past weekend's performances, I close the door on my time on stage as Tuzenbach, one of the great roles period and particularly for actor's of my type. Where the jocks get to play Biff Loman, the geeks play Tuzenbach. Not that I seriously view the great roles of theater through a lens of base a archetypes, but it's kinda true. I am kind of a geek, and Tuzenbach is one of the roles in the western dramatic canon that I'm ideally suited for and indeed one of the most beautiful. And I say goodbye to the role with no real regrets. I do wish we'd had a longer run than four performances, but such is the way of community theater and especially a play like Three Sisters, a three hour long turn of the century semi-melodrama (which is to say a play on the melodrama but that's another dramaturgical Chekovian can of worms, yes I know $5 words $10 meanings). I don't think I really nailed down the role to the fullness of my capability until the second weekend... but when I nailed it down, I nailed that sucker down. The most fun and the most challenging part of the role is definitely the big dramatic death scene, where Tuzenbach comes face to face with his great existential quandary, Irina's inability to love him and subsequently his inability so save her/bring her meaning/find happiness with her. The fact of the scene being he's loved her to bits the entire play, and throughout as he's watched her suffering and remorse escalate fantasized about taking her away to some mystical shangri-la of work and eternal happiness... but in the end he can't give that to her, and she can't give him what he needs which is her true affection, so he fights a duel and dies.
During the process, my friend and cast mate Ron referenced a conversation he had with a Russian coworker who said that for the Russians, (this is my summary/interpretation) Chekhov is sort of like dramatic comedia de'll arte, and for a Russian audience characters like the drunken doctor or the nobody who thinks he is or could have been an intellectual savior of Russia (ex; Konstantin, Vanya, Andrei, etc) are recognizable archetypes. I think in the case of Tuzenbach, he's a reflection of a popular literary idea that I've blogged about it, that of the romantic/intellectual hero-poet, the classic example being Werther and that's why he's German because it's an idea of Germanic origin, etc I've talked about this. I've further though that Solyony, Tuzenbach's counterpart in the army and his rival for Irina's affection who goes on to kill him, is sort of like his Russian doppleganger. In Solyony's case, he's decidedly anti intellectual and violent, perhaps even a sociopath and identifies himself with the Russian author Lermontov who wrote novels about romantic heroes sleeping with lots of women and fighting duels (credit to Scott, who played him, for that background). So in that sense, they kind of mirror one another, two sides of the same coin which explains why Tuzenbach is so inexplicably drawn to him and why Solyony constantly torments him except when their alone, when they get along pretty well, blah blah contents of the play.
Anyway, this is a long build up to how it is that Tuzenbach embodies some of Solyony's madness at the end of the play, leading him to (in our version, anyway) lash out at Irina before going off to die in a duel in a final act of desperation, and as a way out of a life that he simply can't continue living while maintaining his romantic hero factor (because one of the ways romantic heroes die is in duels).
One of the things the director and I struggled with in our collaborations was this whole where Tuzenbach goes off about trees and shit, and their permanence against our mortality and it's like what? You're about to go off and die and this is what you give the love of your life before you do? Initially, we tried it where this passage is a moment of introspection for Tuzenbach where he collects himself after going off on her, and I think that's part of it. But after reblocking it where Irina was available during this speech for Tuzenbach to connect with her and during the second to last performance where I was the mostly deeply connected I would be to my scene partner and the given circumstances... I felt like I figured it out. It's his way of forgiving her, and his plea for forgiveness for what he's about to do, that in the end the trees are the way they are and will continue to be so and that we don't control the way we feel or how the universe affects us. It's not her fault that she couldn't love him, and it's not his that he has to do what he's about to do, and then even when he's gone some part of him will continue in the world and in her and it's also tied it into (I think) romantic ideas and values about the natural world and our connection to it as human beings. And that's what he's leaving her with before he dies. And in the second to last performance, I really felt like I did that, and that's the moment I blogged about where I saw a real tear go down her face and I thought to my self "yes, this acting" and I found the full truth of the moment, of two lovers saying goodbye for the last time.
If I have those moments, I tend I find to have them once per production (in the case of the two productions where I've had them, small sample size). My scene partner and I found it in the second or third to last performance of Swimming in the Shallows. I think I blogged about this at the time, but it was a particularly unresponsive audience in that tiny theater so when I came to my big romantic scene with The Shark, instead of playing to them for laughs like I usually might I just focused on The Shark and tuned them out completely, and felt the romance and chemistry of those moments, and then in the moment of our big dramatic kiss it felt... real in a way that it hadn't prior. And didn't in the remaining performances. The same being true of Three Sisters, not that Saturday's show was worse than Friday's just different. And that's the lesson I'm still learning as a stage actor, even when you find what is in a way the perfection of a moment like that, it is the perfection of that moment and every subsequent moment is inherently different, ya dig? So it's a fools errand to try to replicate that perfection, because it's impossible, you have to find the truth of THIS moment and you have to refind it every time you go on stage. And that's the truth and the challenge and the beauty of acting on stage, you have to try every time and you get to try again.
My hope is that I'll get to try again someday with Tuzenbach, but if I don't, then this was a production I can be satisfied with and moving forward harbor no regrets, because I lived a dream role and embodied it to the fullness of my ability at that time and made it something beautiful. The end.
Goodbye Three Sisters, no not goodbye but farewell for we shall not meet again. Or if we do, who will we be then? (Quote from the play, sort of). Someone else entirely, and the moments will be all the same... but different in every way.
During the process, my friend and cast mate Ron referenced a conversation he had with a Russian coworker who said that for the Russians, (this is my summary/interpretation) Chekhov is sort of like dramatic comedia de'll arte, and for a Russian audience characters like the drunken doctor or the nobody who thinks he is or could have been an intellectual savior of Russia (ex; Konstantin, Vanya, Andrei, etc) are recognizable archetypes. I think in the case of Tuzenbach, he's a reflection of a popular literary idea that I've blogged about it, that of the romantic/intellectual hero-poet, the classic example being Werther and that's why he's German because it's an idea of Germanic origin, etc I've talked about this. I've further though that Solyony, Tuzenbach's counterpart in the army and his rival for Irina's affection who goes on to kill him, is sort of like his Russian doppleganger. In Solyony's case, he's decidedly anti intellectual and violent, perhaps even a sociopath and identifies himself with the Russian author Lermontov who wrote novels about romantic heroes sleeping with lots of women and fighting duels (credit to Scott, who played him, for that background). So in that sense, they kind of mirror one another, two sides of the same coin which explains why Tuzenbach is so inexplicably drawn to him and why Solyony constantly torments him except when their alone, when they get along pretty well, blah blah contents of the play.
Anyway, this is a long build up to how it is that Tuzenbach embodies some of Solyony's madness at the end of the play, leading him to (in our version, anyway) lash out at Irina before going off to die in a duel in a final act of desperation, and as a way out of a life that he simply can't continue living while maintaining his romantic hero factor (because one of the ways romantic heroes die is in duels).
One of the things the director and I struggled with in our collaborations was this whole where Tuzenbach goes off about trees and shit, and their permanence against our mortality and it's like what? You're about to go off and die and this is what you give the love of your life before you do? Initially, we tried it where this passage is a moment of introspection for Tuzenbach where he collects himself after going off on her, and I think that's part of it. But after reblocking it where Irina was available during this speech for Tuzenbach to connect with her and during the second to last performance where I was the mostly deeply connected I would be to my scene partner and the given circumstances... I felt like I figured it out. It's his way of forgiving her, and his plea for forgiveness for what he's about to do, that in the end the trees are the way they are and will continue to be so and that we don't control the way we feel or how the universe affects us. It's not her fault that she couldn't love him, and it's not his that he has to do what he's about to do, and then even when he's gone some part of him will continue in the world and in her and it's also tied it into (I think) romantic ideas and values about the natural world and our connection to it as human beings. And that's what he's leaving her with before he dies. And in the second to last performance, I really felt like I did that, and that's the moment I blogged about where I saw a real tear go down her face and I thought to my self "yes, this acting" and I found the full truth of the moment, of two lovers saying goodbye for the last time.
If I have those moments, I tend I find to have them once per production (in the case of the two productions where I've had them, small sample size). My scene partner and I found it in the second or third to last performance of Swimming in the Shallows. I think I blogged about this at the time, but it was a particularly unresponsive audience in that tiny theater so when I came to my big romantic scene with The Shark, instead of playing to them for laughs like I usually might I just focused on The Shark and tuned them out completely, and felt the romance and chemistry of those moments, and then in the moment of our big dramatic kiss it felt... real in a way that it hadn't prior. And didn't in the remaining performances. The same being true of Three Sisters, not that Saturday's show was worse than Friday's just different. And that's the lesson I'm still learning as a stage actor, even when you find what is in a way the perfection of a moment like that, it is the perfection of that moment and every subsequent moment is inherently different, ya dig? So it's a fools errand to try to replicate that perfection, because it's impossible, you have to find the truth of THIS moment and you have to refind it every time you go on stage. And that's the truth and the challenge and the beauty of acting on stage, you have to try every time and you get to try again.
My hope is that I'll get to try again someday with Tuzenbach, but if I don't, then this was a production I can be satisfied with and moving forward harbor no regrets, because I lived a dream role and embodied it to the fullness of my ability at that time and made it something beautiful. The end.
Goodbye Three Sisters, no not goodbye but farewell for we shall not meet again. Or if we do, who will we be then? (Quote from the play, sort of). Someone else entirely, and the moments will be all the same... but different in every way.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
"Be in the moment... NOW"
Today in rehearsal I had to remind myself of one of the most basic acting principals: be in the moment and stay there. We are at a challenging stage of rehearsals for Swimming in the Shallows. Oh wait, let's see, our read through was only February 7th, and last night we had our first run off book (it was pretty messy, as you might imagine). We open March 8th. So more or less, that puts us two weeks in with two weeks ago. At this point, I'm pretty off book, you know, mostly off book. There are some passages that need further attention on my part. But overall, I have the text in my head and I've hammered out a rudimentary shape to the character and it's arc. My scenes, especially the ones we've had more time to give attention to, like one early scene that we spent tonight's rehearsal pulling apart, have a form and a rhythm that I'm comfortable with. Too comfortable with, as with tonight's scene, I was blowing through it without really thinking about what I'm saying or more importantly why I'm saying it. This text is pretty tricky though, rhythmically it's very demanding, it's sort of similar to Shakespeare in that it's written to be performed without unnecessary pauses but you see pauses are your best friend as a modern, realistic actor because they give you time to think, or to create the illusion of thought in your character.
Shakespeare's text is written in verse, in iambic pentameter, and there is a way that if you can find and follow the pentameter the text will carry it with you through performance and into all the various discoveries the character makes in it's journey. So if you know what your saying and how to say it, basically Shakespeare does the work for you. This technique, however tough a nut to crack, is pretty astounding! Swimming in the Shallows has a similarly rhythmic quality, you don't have time to stop and think you have to think with the line, as John Barton says in "Playing Shakespeare" or you know something like that.
But the thing I had to remind myself of tonight was to "be in the moment" and actually listen to my scene partner, even though I know exactly what she's going to say, I had to ACTUALLY HEAR HER SAY IT before I RESPONDED. Man, that's hard sometimes, right? So yes, I was committing the crime of anticipation. It's tough being halfway through, especially in this short process when I have so much still to figure out. And time to figure it out in. But not too much time!
Now that I've learned the text... I have to unlearn it. Real jedi type shit, huh? But it's true, and every actor worth their salt is reminded of it, every time we get on stage.
Shakespeare's text is written in verse, in iambic pentameter, and there is a way that if you can find and follow the pentameter the text will carry it with you through performance and into all the various discoveries the character makes in it's journey. So if you know what your saying and how to say it, basically Shakespeare does the work for you. This technique, however tough a nut to crack, is pretty astounding! Swimming in the Shallows has a similarly rhythmic quality, you don't have time to stop and think you have to think with the line, as John Barton says in "Playing Shakespeare" or you know something like that.
But the thing I had to remind myself of tonight was to "be in the moment" and actually listen to my scene partner, even though I know exactly what she's going to say, I had to ACTUALLY HEAR HER SAY IT before I RESPONDED. Man, that's hard sometimes, right? So yes, I was committing the crime of anticipation. It's tough being halfway through, especially in this short process when I have so much still to figure out. And time to figure it out in. But not too much time!
Now that I've learned the text... I have to unlearn it. Real jedi type shit, huh? But it's true, and every actor worth their salt is reminded of it, every time we get on stage.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Remaining Thankful
I feel like this post (as I mentally compose it) belongs it some kind of shitty self help book or motivational lecture, but here we go anyway because it's true.
Thanksgiving is over, for the moment we are technically in the midst of "the holidays" (for the moment, just wait until January, then February and what I'm talking about will truly manifest) and from a perspective of societal conditioning it's a time of year meant to reinforce our senses of gratitude, which as the over privileged members of the wealthiest, most sophisticated society in the history of the known universe we tend to lose sight of, and focus on our "first world problems" (I really enjoy that phrase because it's so true).
I for one am guilty of this, I always have been. It becomes especially difficult to remember that life is fundamentally good when it's as dark and cold outside as it gets during the winter in New England, and to forget about the great things one (in this case, me) has going for one's (my) self.
This is particularly true given the state of the world we live in, we have this incredibly wealthy, technologically sophisticated society and in our own borders people go hungry, can't afford or are even denied access to the right to a decent education (this is especially criminal in our public schools which are being devoured alive by the same forces behind ineffective charter schools which are propositioned as "the answer" but are really just a means to funnel state money into profit making eduventures but that is another post).
Even though Thanksgiving is over, here are things I'm grateful for. My health, running water, electricity, my very comfortable apartment, living in Cambridge, having a supporting family, my girlfriend, my acting career, being part of what's going to be a great production.
Last night especially I lost sight of all that, and was grumpy at the various tasks allotted to me as part of my not exclusively acting related role in this particular production. But then again, I'm working on Chekov, in a great theatre, with a great group of people and so many actors would kill for that opportunity so what do I have to complain about, really?
Exactly. Turning it around to buddhism for a moment... just that. Be in the moment. Appreciate what's in front of you, from the socks on your feet to the breath in your lungs. Seriously. Do that right now. OK continue worrying about things outside of your control, I do it, everybody does it and it's inevitable and futile. Now be in the moment. Repeat. Life isn't so bad. In fact, it is inherently good. That is the only thing resembling a religious mantra I require.
Thanksgiving is over, for the moment we are technically in the midst of "the holidays" (for the moment, just wait until January, then February and what I'm talking about will truly manifest) and from a perspective of societal conditioning it's a time of year meant to reinforce our senses of gratitude, which as the over privileged members of the wealthiest, most sophisticated society in the history of the known universe we tend to lose sight of, and focus on our "first world problems" (I really enjoy that phrase because it's so true).
I for one am guilty of this, I always have been. It becomes especially difficult to remember that life is fundamentally good when it's as dark and cold outside as it gets during the winter in New England, and to forget about the great things one (in this case, me) has going for one's (my) self.
This is particularly true given the state of the world we live in, we have this incredibly wealthy, technologically sophisticated society and in our own borders people go hungry, can't afford or are even denied access to the right to a decent education (this is especially criminal in our public schools which are being devoured alive by the same forces behind ineffective charter schools which are propositioned as "the answer" but are really just a means to funnel state money into profit making eduventures but that is another post).
Even though Thanksgiving is over, here are things I'm grateful for. My health, running water, electricity, my very comfortable apartment, living in Cambridge, having a supporting family, my girlfriend, my acting career, being part of what's going to be a great production.
Last night especially I lost sight of all that, and was grumpy at the various tasks allotted to me as part of my not exclusively acting related role in this particular production. But then again, I'm working on Chekov, in a great theatre, with a great group of people and so many actors would kill for that opportunity so what do I have to complain about, really?
Exactly. Turning it around to buddhism for a moment... just that. Be in the moment. Appreciate what's in front of you, from the socks on your feet to the breath in your lungs. Seriously. Do that right now. OK continue worrying about things outside of your control, I do it, everybody does it and it's inevitable and futile. Now be in the moment. Repeat. Life isn't so bad. In fact, it is inherently good. That is the only thing resembling a religious mantra I require.
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