“Forming a Practice of Hope” is a monthly guide that will be published throughout the 2025 Jubilee Year in the Catholic Church. It is designed to spark a personal spiritual practice that is flexible and doable and is meant to be a road map that examines dynamics of the creative life and spiritual life. Read the other monthly guides here.
One of the refrains I use most in my teaching is “notice and adjust.” It is at the core of what actors do in rehearsal and the reason why we must repeat things again and again when we work. We are looking for an even better fit, an even clearer path, an even deeper filling of a moment.
When I work with beginning actors, adjusting is one of the most difficult things to do. They become attached to the first impulse and reluctant to modify it. They think that they will lose something if they make an adjustment or they imagine that the work is too fragile. Or they judge themselves thinking that something in them flawed if they can’t come up with the perfect balance immediately. We’ve all been there. But once we’ve experienced the deepening of what adjustment can do for the process, we open up and begin to crave this way of playing.
The same can be said of the spiritual life. The Examen, as we have described it, encourages us to be grateful for what bears fruit in our lives, but calls attention to the adjustments that could be made for bearing more. Like pruning a tree, it recognizes that our attention can be intentionally focused to our desired goals.
The best adjustments are based on clear observations in our noticing of what is really going on.
We are at a time of great adjustment right now… for better or worse it is just where we are. We have suffered the loss Pope Francis, upheaval in the world arena, our very environment is measurably changing. Adjustment seems daunting.
Looking back on our last two months of “noticing” and the practice we have built prepares us for the next step. Adjustments can come from your own intuition, from a director’s note, or from something that happens by chance in the process. We need to remain open and available to whatever comes up and ready to embrace it, even if this means we must look past the immediate sting we feel when we admit that something can indeed be done better.
The best adjustments are based on clear observations in our noticing of what is really going on. Unless we have an appreciation of the multiple facets of any given moment, we won’t have a clear perspective on how the best adjustments can happen. Unless I notice the facets of myself or my character, I can’t be free in how I adjust. What are my default settings that I keep settling into when I’m faced with change? Fighting or surrendering? Pushing or collapsing? Denying or commenting? Criticizing or overthinking? Dismissing or punishing? Notice what you do naturally, and with each day’s repetition, try a different option — maybe even the opposite of what you would normally do. See the new possibility as a fun option. You can always go on to something else or back to what you already had before. Notice fully, adjust accordingly.
Life story:
One of my greatest collaborators has been an amazing actress and wonderful singer Margi Sharp Douglas. Margi and I founded Magis Theatre Company together. She introduced me and the company to the Alexander Technique. It is a way of having a conversation with your body, noticing where things are out of alignment and allowing the body to figure out what the best adjustment is. Rather than saying “don’t slump,” this technique focuses on a question: “What would it be like if my shoulders were lighter?” Or: “What would it be like if there were just a little more space between my vertebrae?” This sense of curious questioning can be contagious and make the adjustment much more enjoyable in any process.
Work Story:
I’m a big fan of Cherry Jones, not only because of her fine work but because of her openness in process. She spoke to our class when I was in graduate school. Sometime after that I ran into her on the street when she was preparing for her role in “Doubt.” Of course she was working as she was walking, going over her lines. Nonetheless, she stopped, and we had a brief conversation about work, people we had worked with, etc. I was so impressed that she took time, that she adjusted what she was doing to take in this new moment of our conversation.
She has a way of giving her attention totally to whomever she is speaking to at the moment. As actors, we are too aware of the fact that everyone seems to have an opinion about our work. Often we spend lots of energy disregarding these opinions to protect our own, but Cherry listens. When asked why she does this so openly, she quite naturally exclaimed, “Oh it’s all information!” What a great way to look at an adjustment. Seeing what comes to us as “information” takes away the sting of shifting. It’s no longer personal, it’s just new. We can take it, or leave it, but if we don’t even open ourselves to it, we deprive ourselves of new colors and textures as we continue to work on our craft.
Further investigation:
Thomas Kuhn’s book “The Nature of Scientific Revolutions” examines the idea of a paradigm shift in thinking and how often our attentiveness to data that do not seem to fit our ideas will break open our thinking about the nature of what it is that we are considering. If this seems too academic for you, take a look at “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson. It’s a delightful parable about how we can deal with change productively.
Suggestions:
- Pick three small commonplace but interesting objects and place them on your desk or windowsill in any arrangement. Does the arrangement suggest an impression to you? A title? Make one adjustment to the arrangement each day and notice how it changes the character of the arrangement.
- Notice yourself as you compose a message or an email. What are the things that make you go back and make changes? What do you notice about yourself in that process?
- As you keep doing the Examen (outlined in month 3 on noticing) adjust steps 4 and 5. For step 4, ask what got in the way of the good you intended and imagine adjustments you could have made to stay on track. In step 5, pray for the grace to remember that you can adjust when you feel yourself getting pulled off course.
- See if you can remember the best note or adjustment that you got from an acting teacher or director. What was it about that note that made it so productive for you? Write about it. Then think of the most difficult or annoying note you ever got, and see if you can adjust your understanding of what the information was in the note now that you have a little distance from it.
- Write random adjectives on slips of paper and put them in a hat or bowl or bag. (words like red, effervescent, gravelly, legato). Pick one and just keep it in mind the next time you go through a scene or monologue or as you engage in any other creative process. What does that small adjustment do? What is it like when you try three or four and then drop them all and go back to the scene without special attention to the adjustment? Has anything changed?
- Try and find a different way of getting someplace you go to frequently. What happens when you take another route? Notice everything going on inside as you try this new way.
- Move something slightly in your apartment or workplace and see if others notice, and if they do notice, see how they react or what they do.
- Add, subtract or substitute one ingredient in a recipe or dish that you cook often.
Other suggestions: Look at some images that are considered optical illusions and notice what happens when your eyes adjust; think of a friend and imagine doing an activity that you do regularly as if you were that person; try a dance move in reverse or read the first 10 words in today’s news backwards.