Desparate Improvisation, Significant Achievement

In her book Composing a Life, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson writes:  “We must invest time and passion in specific goals and yet at the same time acknowledge that these are mutable . . . What are the possible transfers of learning when life is a collage of different tasks?  How does creativity flourish on distraction?  What insights arise from the experience of multiplicity and ambiguity?  And at what point does desperate improvisation become significant achievement?” (1990, 9-10).

Since my first reading of Bateson’s book in 1996, I have carried this quotation around with me from one desperate improvisation to another, asking myself at every turn of the wheel, At what point does desperate improvisation become significant achievement?  The answer perhaps lies in the hero/ine’s tale.  Desperate improvisation is Theseus in the labyrinth and Psyche ever at Aphrodite’s thankless tasks, in the midst of their adventures, no place for measuring change or time for reflection upon the life journey.  Significant achievement does come but not before each has climbed some version of the mountain and journeyed into its darkest, deepest caverns.  In Theseus’s case, it was the labyrinth of the Minotaur.  In Psyche’s, no less than her craggy rock above the sea and eventually the underworld of Queen Persephone.

And what of us mere mortals?  We too traverse our own mountains, deserts and dark places, not all of which are negative, but in true paradoxical fashion, both, and.  We are the actors of the myths, playing out the eternal themes.  These trials of the gods and goddesses are none other than the grander echoes of our initiatory journey through Life Itself.  Our achievements and failures work through us and are worked out by us as we are woven and rewoven on the great loom of the Fates.  All we are asked to do by the myths is learn to ride the cycles, knowing that where there is flow, there will be ebb; where there is up, as Inanna and Persephone well know, there will also be down; where there are seven fat cows, as Pharoah’s dream eternally reminds us, there will eventually be seven lean cows.

Too many times do we need to relearn this archetypal lesson, hence the constant retelling and need to hear the tales as they move through our lives.  When we are not the mere playthings of the Fates, but take up our responsibility of co-creation with them, we work with awareness and mindfulness with the great cycles.  Perhaps only then can we speak of significant achievement.  For Theseus, it was the triumphant return to Delos where he shared his adventures and made new traditions.  For Psyche, it was the sacred marriage, the hieros gamos, a symbolic understanding of the creation within the self of the third way that we discover when we work within the sacred boundaries of paradox.  In both myths, each hero/ine walks the ‘as above, so below’ and the ‘as within, so without.’

Of course in our very ordinary mortal lives, significant achievement happens daily:  the meal well cooked and enjoyed; the hours of rest we allow ourselves from the working day; the budget kept to; the bill paid in full; progress or completion made on the essay, painting, museum exhibit, article, book, sculpture, movie or play script; help or assistance given to the friend in need; time used productively; and so on.

How do we measure desperate improvisation?  How do we measure significant achievement?