Midlife Meditation

There's a word improvisers use that I've incorporated into my daily vocabulary: heightening. In improv, heightening is adding risk to a scene by amping up emotions, adding elements that may seem random, or seizing on a player's goof and making it part of the scene that is unfolding. The goal of heightening is to raise the fictional stakes and make the game more real--reality, after all, is chaotic, not scripted--but in truth, the stakes are actually very low for the players. The worst that can happen to them is that the scene will collapse, end on a weak note, turn off the audience, all of which is part of the package when one is in an improv theater. Things don't always work out in a meaningful, hilarious way. Sometimes even the best improv troupes go into territory that makes the audience uncomfortable or just doesn't work. I've been thinking about heightening and stakes because, as my last two posts will reveal, I've had enough time in my new position...

I am an early adopter. Just to be clear, I'm not a first adopter. I don't buy the latest tech when it's hot off the freighter from whatever Chinese mega-plant it was assembled in. If possible, I try someone else's early-adopted purchase first, then give myself some time, just to be sure the kinks are worked out. Sometimes that means getting a second- or third-generation version of a promising technology. But I do like to be in the front of the pack on these things. Thus I became a Macintosh user shortly after user-friendliness was introduced to the personal computer world, but waited six years to be a Mac owner. The Macs I learned on were located at the library of my seminary. I typed most of my papers on them, except one that had to be done on a manual typewriter due to a power outage. Getting access to a computer was still too inconvenient for me to learn to compose on one, so I would write my first draft on notebook paper, then type it into a word processor...