The piece I wrote for the German magazine called Improfil came out this month. It’s odd everything is in German yet my article remains in English. Earlier they told me they were working on a translation. Maybe this is German humour? Either way I like being part of an international conspiracy (I mean a new one).

The Improviser’s Water

Twenty years ago, at Kenyon College, the late author David Foster Wallace offered a parable so deceptively simple it shimmered with parabolic light: an old fish glides by two young ones and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The young ones swim on in awkward silence, until one frowns, “What the hell is water?” This is the question not just of bewildered fish but of humans marooned in the era of breathless data, crumbling certainties, and caffeinated chaos. The “water” is the improvisation we’re swimming in but can’t yet name. To see life as improvisation is not to dismiss it as chaos, but to embrace it as something holy, feral, and real.

The deeper this realization seeps into the bloodstream, the more it dismantles our neat categories art, identity, selfhood and replaces them with something more electric: presence. It is the salt in Cecil Taylor’s rhythmic explosions, the incense of Montsalvatge’s dissonant prayers, the shriek of Nina Hagen’s divine hysteria. John Cage, that monk of provocation, walked onto the stage, sat at the piano, closed the lid, and invited us into 4 minutes and 33 seconds of what was not there. The audience, expecting Brahms or at least a proper bang, got nothing and everything. I laughed, of course. I thought I understood: silence is part of music too. Bravo, Mr. Cage. How clever.

But improvisation, like water, is not merely the pause it’s the pulse. The thing itself. We humans are quick to proclaim insight, slower to embody it. You can warn a child about the burn, but until skin touches stove, it’s just words. So too with improvisation: we can write about it, preach it, quote Zen koans about clapping hands no one can see but understanding only blooms in the doing. The paradox, as Cage knew, isn’t to be solved. It’s to be lived with. Not decoded, but inhabited. Improvisation is like falling in love with a question you know will never answer you back. It is Hasidic laughter echoing in the Sufi desert, a koan muttered in the voice of Coltrane, a whispered chant that says: “Don’t plan – listen.”

And we must listen now more than ever. Because look around do you hear it? The improvisational hum of the present moment? It’s there in the newsfeed that mutates by the hour, in the rising oceans, the collapsing empires, the hiccuping democracies, the ever-scrolling apocalypse. The world improvises and in what universe are we not as well? We thought progress was a staircase. Turns out it’s an improviser’s solo. Nations, institutions, and people grope forward like blind prophets, responding not with blueprints but with breath. Doctors in pandemic war zones crafting new protocols mid-panic. Volunteers rebuilding towns with no plans but open hearts. Teachers tossing their syllabi into the fire and resurrecting the sacred in story and song. These are not flukes. Improvisation is not the shadow of order it is its secret twin. But make no mistake: improvisation is not romantic. It is not tidy. It is not a bohemian pastime. It is terrifying. It rips the map from your hand. It dares you to speak before your thought has taken shape. There is no teleprompter. Only this breath. This note. This now. We fear improvising the way we fear being seen. Not as prepared, polished, or poised but as real. Improvisation is a striptease of the soul. You step into the moment not knowing if you’ll rise or fall and you do it anyway.

How does one learn such trust? Slowly. Through scars, through tremors, through the odd miracle. Through moments when your surprise you. Through silence that outlasts fear. Through becoming a dark-room creature, stumbling until your body invents a new kind of vision. Trust comes like sleep, when you stop trying so hard. Improvisation is freefall, but it’s also flight. And in that alert falling, we become most alive.

And so like all tales worth their salt we return to the fish. The old one glides by, trailing wisdom like bubbles. “How’s the water?” he asks. The young ones do not know. They shrug. They swim. But the day will come when one of them pauses, feels the current, and realizes: this is not background it’s the whole story. Improvisation is not the disruption of life’s plan. It is life’s pulse, its medium, its hidden river. And when we stop resisting that current, when we tune ourselves to it, like a sitar finding its drone, like a poet following a scent instead of a path, we become not merely functional or clever. We become, at last, the kind of fish who knows what water is.