For those of you who don’t check the comments section, I draw your attention to this plaintive cri de coeur from one “Roy”:

I feel down on my improv a lot, and I know it hurts the show. But how in the hell do I shake that?

I wouldn’t presume to give “Roy” advice on improv, because for all I know he’s a seasoned performer whose troupe has 98 shows under its collective belt, and if that’s the case it would be pretty silly for me to be telling him what’s what.

But I have experience in other areas that might prove relevant, and I share it now.

Here’s a powerful idea that has served me well for almost five years. It’s easy to remember, and there are very few situations in which it’s not useful. Ready? It goes like this:

I don’t know.

Why do we get down on ourselves about our improv? Because we make mistakes, or don’t play the way we’d intended to, or don’t honor principles we think are important, or just have a bad show. Fair enough.

Except that all of these problems are based on two assumptions:

1. I know what should have happened.
2. It was within my power to make that happen.

To which I reply:

1. No you fucking don’t.
2. Okay, maybe, but if number 1 is wrong then number 2 is quite possibly less important than you thought it was.

I really believe this: I’m not qualified to say what’s a mistake and what’s not.

I’m not just talking about improv. I’m talking about realizing that over the course of my entire life, things that at the time seemed like horrible missteps turned out to be crucial turning points or delayed-fuse epiphanies or raw material for later mind-blowing wonderfulness.

A lot of it, of course, is that I choose to view them that way. But I’m the decider, yes? And what is improv but an endless series of decisions that what just happened was the best thing that possibly could have happened?

Good improvisers say yes. Everybody knows this. And recently I’ve had a series of teachers who drilled it into me mercilessly: Say yes to everything. Even the offers you don’t like. Especially the offers you don’t like.

Because I’m a good student, and want to do well at this, and welcome the opportunity to be a positive force in the world, I say “Yes! To everything!”

And in a dark recess of my brain, back in that fucked-up part that wants me dead, the part I visit less and less often these days but which will always be there, a cracked and horrid voice adds the lethal qualifier:

“Yes! To everything! . . . except me.”

There it is. We spend weeks and months of our lives learning how to honor and celebrate our teammates’ contributions, but we can’t be bothered to extend the same courtesy to ourselves. What did we ever do to us to be treated like this?

For me, the essential fact about improv is that I don’t know. I’m a writer; if I knew, I’d just go home and write it. But I don’t know. I need other people and the terror of a mind suddenly as blank as an empty page just before the moment spills into it and makes itself known. The moment knows. I don’t know.

And if I don’t know, if I really honor that and believe it, I will have to admit that I don’t know even after it’s already happened. Whatever happened happened, and my job is to say yes to whatever happened . . . even if that puts me in the position of saying yes to someone who’s saying no. Even if that someone is (shamefully, horribly) me.

Let’s address the issue that has been distracting you for the last ten paragraphs or so. “Of course there are mistakes, Ratliff,” you say, huffily adjusting your monocle. “If someone is named Sharmila in a scene and later I call her Svetlana, that’s a mistake. Period.”

Okay. But this is where number 2 above comes in. You’re assuming you had the power to do otherwise.

I don’t want to get into a long debate about free will and the power of the unconscious. My point is that if we’re plying an art that is based almost entirely on the accidental, the ephemeral, and the existential, it seems a little arrogant to claim that we’re in control up there. Are you sure you could have avoided that mistake? How could you possibly know that?

We can be rigorous and dedicated in our practice, and we can try our best to create circumstances in which we play well. But once the show starts, we have to swim in the soup that surrounds us. At that point, it becomes irrelevant how much or how little we’ve prepared. Here we are now.

I would prefer to be completely open and relaxed and alert and supportive and brilliant and present every time I play. But that doesn’t always happen. So sometimes I find myself onstage feeling leaden and negative and weak and wasted.

That sucks. But I have a surefire way to make it even worse: I start beating myself up about it.

If I were in better shape, I wouldn’t feel tired and I could make my body do what I wanted. If I would just meditate regularly, I’d be able to concentrate on what people are saying. Why didn’t I set goals for myself before I came onstage? Hello, tailspin. Goodbye, improv.

Or I can take a moment and say this to myself: “Okay, I just screwed up her name. That means I’m not very present tonight, and furthermore my knees are killing me, and I’m pretty sure that’s my ex on the couch with her new boyfriend. I wish it were otherwise, but I need to acknowledge these things and work with them, because that’s apparently the reality right now. If I accept that and recommit, I can still contribute something to the show and not bring everyone down with me. (Emphasis added.)

Here’s what improv teachers (and Zen masters) say: “Be in the moment.”

Here’s what they don’t say: “Be in the moment that you think you’d be having if you were at the top of your game, which you’re not because you failed to adequately prepare yourself because you suck.”

If you’re really committed to this moment, you’re committed to everything in this moment, INCLUDING YOUR OWN GLORIOUSLY FUCKED-UP COSMICALLY INFINITE CRIPPLINGLY LIMITED PERFECT SELF. What if you you drop dead right after the curtain call? What if this is the last chance you’ll ever get to do this? This is it. No do-overs.

What is it we do? We take two or three fragments of this moment and rub them together until they ignite. The more fragments we figure out how to add to the fire without choking it, the more compelling our creation. If we dismiss or ignore something, it doesn’t get used, and at the end of the night it’s just sitting there scorched and discarded at the side of the stage, damning evidence of the limits of our love.