One Time, One Meeting

In a drawing our seven-year-old granddaughter made during the lockdown, Rapunzel is escaping from the wicked witch’s tower. “We rescue ourselves without long hair,” she explains, as she and a companion descend from a rope suspended from a window. Meanwhile a knight-in-arms, who has arrived on cue to liberate the damsel in distress, looks on, bewildered.

Our granddaughter’s drawing admits of multiple interpretations. To a contemporary feminist, it might exemplify a salutary revision of a patriarchal tale. To a child psychologist, it might represent a healthy, if anxious, response to prolonged confinement. But to a Marine Corps veteran—or anyone who remembers Clint Eastwood’s movie Heartbreak Ridge—the imprisoned maiden’s resourceful escape might bring to mind a familiar mantra.

Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome may or may not have originated with the US Marines, but it has long been associated with that branch of the armed services. According to one theory, the motto reflects the fact that the Marines, for all their valor on land and sea and in the air, have often found themselves on the tail end of the supply chain. They have learned to make do. Their verbal triumvirate, itself a model of minimalism and concision, offers one effective way of dealing with adversity, uncertainty, and deprivation. And, as a three-pronged tool for coping with life’s vicissitudes, it has much in common with three cardinal principles of Zen teachings.

Improvise

Of the truths that the Zen tradition holds to be self-evident, none is more central than the impermanence of all conditioned things. Challenged to encapsulate Zen teachings in seven words, the American poet Jane Hirshfield proposed, “Everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”

If we are indeed paying attention to our experience, we have little choice but to assent to Hirshfield’s first assertion. Not only does everything, in the long or short run, change, be it external phenomena or our private feelings, notions, and states of mind. More fundamentally, those moment-by-moment changes are governed by what Zen calls the law of impermanence. Paradoxically, that natural law differs from human laws in not being subject to revision or revocation.

Given the universality of impermanence, improvisation becomes more than a last resort, to be employed only when there is no practical alternative. It might better be seen as the only realistic response to ever-changing conditions, external and internal. Whether the situation at hand be the absence of an essential ingredient when following a favorite recipe or the arrival of an unexpected visitor just as one is sitting down to dinner, improvisation is often the most practical, appropriate, and humane course of action.

Adapt

The second imperative in Hirshfield’s formulation—“everything is connected”—articulates a second fundamental tenet of Zen teachings, namely the doctrine of interdependence or “dependent origination.” Simply put, this doctrine states that everything depends upon everything else. The things of this world may appear solid, singular, and autonomous, but in reality they are transitory, insubstantial, and interconnected in the vast web of life. As Thich Nhat Hanh explains in his book The Heart of Understanding, a piece of paper depends for its very existence on trees, water, soil, the forester, and so on. Without them, the paper could not exist.

For that reason, it is seldom wise to reflexively apply a rigid formula to a specific situation. Causes and conditions must be considered, and our practiced responses must be adapted to the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves. Analogous to its counterpart in the natural world, the practice of adaptation in human affairs requires us to remain continuously aware of present conditions and to align our best efforts with those conditions, lest our well-intentioned actions prove erroneous or harmful.

Overcome

In its original context, this term applies most directly to external obstacles: whatever stands in the way of a successful mission. Applied to Zen practice, however, the metaphor of conquest may seem a poor fit, the primary aims of the practice being not military victory but clarity, equanimity, and compassionate wisdom.

Yet, in everyday life, Zen practice often involves “going against the grain,” whether that grain be conventional thought or, more immediately, the force of habit. Zen teachings speak often of “habit energy,” viewing that energy in a largely negative light. Ingrained and often impervious to change, our long-standing habits present formidable obstacles to improvisation and adaptation, and more so as we grow older. “I adore tradition,” the pianist and teacher Nadia Boulanger once remarked, “but I cannot stand habit.” Her aversion was not unfounded.

Over time, however, even the force of habit can be overcome, chiefly through the office of mindful awareness. Through diligent practice, Zen teachings assure us, the “energy of mindfulness” can encompass and transform our most corrosive habits of heart and mind. Conjoined with the practices of improvisation and adaptation, it can enable us to live more flexibly and wisely—and rescue us from our self-constructed towers.