Centralight

Deb Poole: Putting "improvation" back in Before Jack was born, my friends asked how I felt about becoming a grandmother. "It's mildly interesting," I replied, assuming nothing could compare with the arrival, years ago, of my own babies. I was wrong. He grabbed my heart instantly and fiercely. "We didn't know we were getting a Jack," I explained to my son as we gazed into the stroller a month later. "How could we know?" he agreed, smiling. It wasn't long before I was phoning my father with an offer: If he was willing to have Internet installed in his house ("Finally!" I thought), I would provide the iPad to bring Jack right into his home. It took 30 seconds to realize that my money was safe (he didn't want one), a minute to remember our family's philosophy ("spend nothing") and 10 minutes to hear about all that goes wrong with electronic devices ("everything"). I started to stew about people who are mired in a set of ideas and a pattern of life before it struck me: I had become mired in a set of ideas and a pattern of life. The evidence was all around me: a vegetable garden that had been in the shade for years (the victim of growing trees), the purse that didn't hold what I needed, the fact that I always wanted lunch at 9:30 a.m. (despite knowing that a Southwestern breakfast would hold me until noon) and the perpetual Band-Aids on my left hand (from a ridiculously poor chopping technique, according to my daughter). When had this happened? As teenagers and young adults, we are all driven to learn and change by a powerful set of forces: intense fear of not making it in life paired with an exquisite sequence of neurological developments that nudge us out of 10 centralight fall '13 the nest by making novelty oh-so attractive. Later, demands from jobs and growing families keep us honing new skills. But somewhere along the line, most of us sink deeply into the familiar. But if experimental psychologists do not always have it together, at least we know why. Our brains, like yours, contain two types of mental machinery: a relatively primitive system that looks for associations among things in the world and builds basic skills and a spiffier system that allows us to think with language and reason our way through life. The first system, our intuitive brain, directs the simple habits that unfold minute to minute, and the workings of this system occur largely under our mental radar. This is usually a good thing, because not thinking about how to walk or which brand of coffee to grab off a shelf frees brain resources so the second system can juggle less mundane issues. Experts believe most of what we do is directed by the first system – and therein lies the problem. Habits of action and thought are laid down gradually and are resistant to change. Moreover, most adults aren't drawn to unfamiliar actions, largely because, in our ancestral past, those who were didn't fare very well. (When your family has lived in the same region for a thousand years, "Gee, let's try that mushroom no one eats" is not a recipe for living.) Change is hard. Still, I wanted to be better, to strive for – what is it called? "Progress" didn't fit: Sometimes, making life better means going back to older ways of doing things. (Think how much healthier most of us would be if we ate as our grandparents did.) "Grit" didn't capture my elusive state-of-being either: Some people have enormous staying power for a singular dream while their lives and relationships collapse around them. Clearly, I needed a new word that encircled the motivation to change, the grit to build new habits and learn new skills, and the reasoned approach needed to analyze the consequences of change so stupid ideas will be cast aside. I needed to invent this: "It struck me: I had become mired in a set of ideas and a pattern of life." im·prov·ation /im'proov ā shәn/ Noun. 1. The motivation and grit to improve some aspect of your life or to learn a new skill. 2. A philosophy of life that values efforts to improve and the systematic evaluation of the efficacy of new approaches. Psychologists would probably tell you the key to improvation is being realistic. I needed to start small, with a few simple fixes I could achieve (so I felt reinforced). First I bought a garlic press that actually worked. Next I replaced my purse with a functional tote bag. Life was better already, so it was time to hunker down. I decided to break the garden project into smaller steps: I would move two raised beds this year and hold off on the rest. They looked good, though, with kale in the sun, so I moved another and then another. By this time, I was an improvation machine. There were things I needed to learn that I hadn't because I'm used to knowing things and become frustrated.

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