Pausing is Progress #4
I defeated covid!
Hi friends,
Last you heard from me, I said “Covid invades my body,” then disappeared for a month. Sorry. Over the next week, my immune system produced a whole lot of antibodies, sent them flowing and circulating through my blood, and instructed them to swarm the virus and latch on for dear life before the virus effects other cells. Covid was eradicated.
All healthy now. Besides a cookie addiction.
Try these, Tate’s Bake Shop Chocolate Chip Cookies. Buttery cookies that don’t leave you feeling lethargic. Dangerous.
This week, I paused for the imagination. I wrote an essay on this.
After reading it, my friend Melissa said in a recent published essay of hers, she noticed a perfect situation to use her imagination.
In the essay, she describes a situation, the action, “crossing the table from start-up founder to investor” and the corresponding feeling, “breath of fresh air”. Breath of fresh air is cliched and quickly written. Upon noticing this, paused and let the imagination play.
For me, when I let the imagination play, first I see a boardroom filled with the freshest air. Second I see bottled water from an aquifer in Fiji. And then the scene animates in my mind, Melissa walks around the elongated table to sit next to the other investors; she’s handed bottled air, flown in from a boreal forest in Finland. She cracks it open and the air fills her lungs. She’s flying.
The essay I wrote is called, Ready-made Phrases
It begins —
A friend emailed me this photo. I typed in to reply, “This photo warms m...” and some gmail robot, energized by 1s and 0s, not a drop of emotion in his system, completed my sentence, “warms my heart.”
THE BASTARD DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A HEART. How the hell could he, COULD IT feel the same as me towards these elephants snuggling together, dozing the afternoon away?
[…]
Melissa also said I ought to run a live workshop. Would anyone be interested in that?
Pausing in Conversations
Conversations can flow in two ways. The first: I say something about an island, you say something about sand, I say something about small rocks, you about palm trees, and so on. The conversation remains in the same context. The second, we jump contexts: island, sand, then hourglass, grim reaper, A Christmas Carol, and so on.
The upright Citizens Brigade calls this A to C. "When you 'go A to C', you have moved beyond saying the obvious or the expected."
In improv this is used for generating specific and interesting information for a scene. We can too generate interesting information in conversations.
When someone asks how the movie was, "It was great" is my reaction. A little better is I saw Dune. The popcorn was great, the movie felt Game-of-Thronish, amazing visuals throughout. But how many other people said the game thing after watching Dune?
Let's get under that ready-made language into your experience.
Movie ⇒ great ⇒ 'popcorn', butter, buttery-fingers.
"The movie was great, I had the butteriest popcorn. It coated my fingers. I went to grab my sparkling water and it damn near slipped out of my fingers." NOW we have an image. I see YOU sitting in the movie theater enjoying the movie.
Many immune systems are battling covid, so maybe cookies weren’t the best recommendation. How about this.
Try these, Fresh Nutrition Liposomal Vitamin C. Small pills that boost immunity by strengthening white blood cells.
<3
Arthur