Some things don't change

Alright, so here we are again! That last entry was a long one. That was fascinating to write in the style of a Harold. I had written three ideas down and had the experiences of the day but didn’t quite understand if and how they were all related. Writing a Harold over a couple of days was an interesting introspective. I was on a similar service yesterday with interesting patient experiences. I also had dinner at my parents’ house, and while looking for a book for my son, I found some old College English papers from high school. I also had upcoming meetings today. I was thinking that I was going to write another one based on yesterday’s events. I think that would be a bit much since it takes a long time, both to read and to write. I am sure the loyal readers of this blog have other activities they would like to be doing. There were some interesting themes that did emerge because I had gone through the exercise of writing the Harold the days prior. 

At moments writing the Harold, I thought that I really had breakthroughs in my understanding of my life, my purpose, and what I am doing. The moment was fleeting, and I am not sure my writing fully captured it. That is what is so magical about the Harold when done well at an improv performance. All those moments arise without thought, instead of in fits and starts over the course of three days of writing. My topics I was writing led to possible deeper moments of understanding because they were personal as opposed to created from suggestions and built in collaboration in front of an audience.

There is a book called Storyworthy that recommends writing down bits of the events of your life so that you can see what is a good story later based on how it fits into themes of your life. If you don’t purposefully write down mini stories in your life, it is unlikely that you will be able to make the connections to the bigger themes of your life. Ain’t that the truth. The themes that spontaneously develop across a Harold are often another surprising source of joy from watching the performance. I’ve found exploring the themes that emerged from my improv performances interesting looks into the things I am thinking about. Sometimes it is something, sometimes it is nothing. I think if I were to look into the three big ideas from yesterday, I could write a long narrative and I don’t know what I would find out because there are a lot of ideas running around my head about the topics of the patients I admitted, my old high school English papers, and the meetings I had today. One issue that came from reading my old writing style is that I suffered from the same problems I am trying to overcome now. In that I would have topics that I could expand on but simply did a surface level evaluation. As I am typing this, I can feel those whiffs of understanding of myself. I immediately think how a Harold on these topics would look and how improv has helped me understand these traits in myself that have been there for a while. Improv hasn’t tried to change anything in me that I haven’t wanted to change in myself for a long time would be one of the themes. Ok, off to the soccer fields and creating new stories