April 10, 2020
Improvising
Sometimes things don’t go as planned.
So you have to learn to improvise. In the words from a movie I used to watch with my Daddy, “adapt and overcome.” (Heartbreak Ridge with Clint Eastwood) Daddy used that phrase all the time, along with “think outside the box,” and “look at it from every angle.” He loved how the scientists and engineers basically dumped a box of items on the table in front of themselves when trying to bring Apollo 13 back to Earth and said “this is what they have, fix the problem with this.”
This kind of thinking is what I try to teach as an educator. I try to have my characters in books use it to solve problems so my readers will grasp the concept that sometimes there are various ways of solving a problem and all of them aren’t obvious.
These deep thoughts came from this: We wanted to watch a family movie and I wanted popcorn. We always air pop popcorn with a new movie! Not a kernel in sight (a 2nd Lieutenant and an Airman, but those wouldn’t work).
Jaquline said, “I’ll make popcorn tangerines!”
She presented us with this
And we continued our family movie night.
Sometimes, you have to do with what you have. Silly thoughts from no popcorn and eating tangerines from a flower instead, right? That’s my crazy writer’s brain.
What have you done to improvise lately? Something that you normally do one way but now are doing differently?
Thank you for reading.
Type at you next time,
~Nancy Tart
