Tippy Toes

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for an improvisation class at one of the city's venerable acting schools.  I don't want or ever have wanted to be an actress, but from time to time, in darker or trying moments, I like to be gently compelled to stay on my tippy toes.  This is not a ballerina fantasy either, I assure you; just a way to re-acquaint myself with that most powerful and guttural hobgoblin of the soul - reinvention.  It seems to me that in its initial stages, reinvention has always stewed slow in my soul, its makings and workings take on an immaterial identity, the path is slow, and then, bam, like an act of God, an extraordinary, unforeseeable manifestation of all the forces of the universe collide, and make me the new person I am.

This time around however, I find myself in deadlock.  I am perhaps the only human Gordian knot - a feat even to Guinness, wherein I am a compact intersection of interlaced disappointments - fastened up way tight.  Although I seemingly am not getting anywhere work-wise, the improv class is doing well by my entanglements.  In the class, all is offhand, and therefore rendered pure.  You're, I am, entrusting my immediate actions and reactions to a set of strangers doing odd things in a room with props, with next to no cynicism, no calculation, or foreseeable gain.  But the gain is gargantuan.  Transcendence occurs here every Tuesday night. I am no longer the knot cited earlier, as in the complex problem, but one now representing an entirely different system of measurement - a unit of speed, and agility.  I am a nautical knot, easily gliding, nimbly navigating the calm after the storm.  

At the end of the class, all fifteen of us, without saying a word, put on our coats, and descend the rickety stairwell back out into the cold.  The silence is gratifying because we all know what we have given, and what we have taken from rendering ourselves completely vulnerable, and naked to the rest of the class.  We, as an individual, and as a collective have surpassed our own trust in ourselves, and our peers.  The reinforcement is delicious when sometimes all there is out there is choppy waters, wind, and a cold shoulder.