Yes and We

I’ve always liked the improv rule of saying “yes.” When I apply it to life in general I call it “Edie’s Rule” because my husband loves to talk about how his mother always kept a positive outlook and how she was always right about things turning out well.

Harold Ramis meant to be giving filmmaking advice here but I find it very universal.

You have to live your life with a certain blind confidence that if it’s your destiny to succeed at these things, it will happen, if you just continue to follow a straight path, to do you work as conscientiously and as creatively as you can, and to just stay open to all opportunity and experience. There’s a performing motto at Second City…to say yes instead of no. It’s actually an improvisational rule…It’s about supporting the other person. And the corollary to that is if you concentrate on making other people look good, then we all have the potential to look good. If you’re just worried about yourself—How am I doing? How am I doing?—which is kind of a refrain in Hollywood, you know, people are desperately trying to make their careers in isolation, independent of everyone around them.

Since my vestibular rehabilitation (relearning balance) started I’ve had what I like to call “getting better headaches” and the blues associated with slow improvement compared to magical unicorn healing. (Magical unicorn healing is that belief that a pill or a surgery will “fix it” without any effort on the sick person’s part.) Sometimes I even feel oppressed by my own inability to think clearly.

I hate not thinking clearly. It’s particularly hard when I know my work is almost entirely brain based. Today as I walked to work after my balancing appointment I had a long conversation with myself and came to this conclusion: I may not be the sharpest crayon in the box but I can be there, handy and helpful and hard working. So that’s my goal. Even on days when I feel like I’ve taken two steps back on my way going forward I can still be Handy, Helpful, and Hard Working. I can say “Yes.”

Besides all that I love the part where Harold Ramis says “And the corollary to that is if you concentrate on making other people look good, then we all have the potential to look good.”  It’s really worth repeating. I may feel off but is it really about me or is it about we?  I think it’s about we, we the group I work with, we the company, we my husband and I, we my family, we the city, we the world. Let’s all look good. Let’s all cover for each other and do as well as we can.

So there it is. Yes & We.