Making the Positive Choice
The late, great, Michael Warren Powell gave me an enormous gift during an audition. A mentor, teacher, and dear friend, he reminded me to make the positive choice. In theater this means that one’s character must have hope, that no matter how futile the given circumstances, no matter how colossal the obstacles, our character believes they will get what they want, that their intention is attainable. If we give up hope, there is no play, no action, no story.
This is true in life, as well. In order to continue, to persevere, we must believe our goals are attainable, that our dreams are possible. Tillich called this, “the courage to be.”
The day MWP gave me this gift, I was auditioning with a monologue from a play about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Ourselves Alone. My character is begging her great love to believe her when she tells him that she has always loved him and was forced to marry someone else while he was in prison and she was pregnant. In the audition, I played this as an argument we’d had many times, and here we were once again. A chronic conversation that I knew would end in yet another loss, a cycle of despair. It had no immediacy.
Michael asked me to “play the positive choice.” This meant that my character was certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this time my love would believe me. Suddenly, the monologue crackled to life, becoming immediate, vital, infused with possibility.
A TED Talk client of mine who spends her life working to eradicate a deadly illness, shifted from a positive to negative choice the night before the event. She had viewed a talk with a similar theme that had a solemnity she emulated. She thought that “being solemn” would give her talk the gravitas it needed to inspire views and likes and maybe raise awareness and funding for her work. Instead, it flattened her delivery, took away any buoyancy or hope. Two things were happening. First, she was no longer playing an action (intention), but was trying to play a state of being, an effect. Secondly, without playing the positive choice, the air was sucked out of her delivery, she was defeated and deflated. Her call to action fell flat.
Playing the positive choice can sound like minimizing the severity, being a pollyanna, or forcing a false optimism. Not at all. In fact, the obstacles remain, but our struggle to overcome them increases. We do not give up.
This week, we practice making the positive choice in every interaction. No matter how seemingly intractable or hopeless, we practice playing the possibility. And then, even if nothing does change, we still have our own voices. Voices of hope.