Yesses and Noes

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell examines what makes for good improvisational comedy. Apparently, the most important rule is saying yes: when someone throws something at you, you don't talk your way around it to stay on track, you accept it into your skit and if it knocks you off course ... aha! You have comedy. As I understand it, the improvisational yes is like a plus sign that creates a whole that is whackier and more magnificent than the sum of its parts.

A couple of months ago, I applied the improv principle and said yes to the presence of yaks on my lawn. Like a good improv game, it took on a life of its own and soon I had a series of yesses that led right out of the blog and took me in happy directions I couldn't have guessed at.

And yet, in my real life I am busy saying no. In fairly entrenched and serious ways.

My therapist has known me a long time, and ten years ago she suggested to me that I might want to experiment with saying yes. Given what I was working on then, it was an experiment well worth making, but what I have to work on right now is something really altogether different. I need to feel confident in my body and connected to my community. More practically, I need to lose weight, I need to get my finances in order, I need to pick up, dust off, and polish my mental health. And I have started applying myself to all of that by saying no first.

If we had stuck with our original plan for this year, I would either be newly pregnant or about to start cycle two this week. And thinking about being in either of those situations instead of where I am terrifies me. There is a principle in Jewish law that accepts abortion as a form of self-defense, because under some circumstances--not all of them medical--the fetus is considered a pursuer that is imperiling the mother. Given the unlikelihood of accidental pregnancy in my life, this has always seemed interesting but not of practical use. But I think that when I decided not to begin insemination this year, I was reacting to the specter of that pursuit.

So now I am thinking about the ways in which the improvisational yes depends on first staking out a clear, strong, boundary-defining no.