At the farmers market, I’m responding to color, and smell, and I’m following my intuition. In my kitchen when I’m imagining where things will lead, I’m improvising.
—Alice Waters, Founder of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard
—Alice Waters, Founder of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard
I once wished I didn’t have to wing it—that I could know in advance what to say, what to do, who to be. But life kept unfolding without a script. Over time, I came to believe that this spontaneous unfolding—this unscriptedness—is simply the way things are. We live in an improvisational universe.
And despite the fact that it is sometimes wonderful but sometimes scary, and sometimes tragic, it offers an invitation: to listen, to respond, to love.
I came to believe that God is winging it, too—that is, improvising in response to what happens in the world, in a spirit of love. God may have general aims or aspirations. I believe this is true. That God is love. But even God does not follow a pre-determined script. Like I said, we live in an improvisational universe.
Has anyone developed a theology of ‘winging it’?”
Living in an Improvisational Universe
Creating on the Fly
To “wing it” is to create on the fly, with or without preparation. Such creativity is not creation out of nothing. It is the creation of something new out of what is given to experience from the past actual world. In human life, what is “given” includes bodily habits, gut feelings, emotional patterns, memories, cultural inheritances, language, relationships, and the immediate situation in which one finds oneself.
Prepared Spontaneity
The act of creating on the fly—of winging it—may indeed be guided, even strongly conditioned, by impulses from the past, including acts of preparation. As Oscar Wilde allegedly said, “Spontaneity is meticulously prepared art.” In this sense, improvisation can be prepared for, even rehearsed in advance—and still, at the decisive moment, something new must happen.
No amount of preparation can fully determine what that moment will become. The past can guide, shape, and constrain, but it cannot dictate the final act. There remains a gap, however small, in which a response is formed—a fresh synthesis that has never existed before.
It is within this gap that spontaneity lives: not as randomness, but as the creative reconfiguration of what has been into what now becomes.
Concrescence and Novelty
This reconfiguration—in language, in bodily action, in perception, and in thought—is an aspect of what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead means by “concrescence” in the present moment. It is an act in which, in his words, “the many become one and are increased by one.” The increase occurs because, in the act of deciding how to configure the past, something new is created.
This spontaneity does not abolish the past; it works with it. It is the power to select, emphasize, reinterpret, and recombine what has been given. In this sense, each moment of improvisation is a small act of self-creation—a becoming that is neither wholly determined nor wholly free, but a creative advance into novelty.
Creating something new out of the past is ontologically inescapable. We may try to avoid creating something new, but even the act of avoidance is itself a creative act—an instance of shaping what becomes. Being is an act of winging it, moment by moment.
An Improvisational Universe
Whitehead suggests that something like this is happening at every level of the universe: a spontaneous act of configuring the past in a new way, whether conscious or unconscious. It is happening at the smallest imaginable scale, in quantum events in the depths of atoms, and at the most inclusive imaginable scale, in a divine Consciousness in whose life the universe lives and moves and has its being.
In the case of quantum events, the past actual world consists in their immediate microscopic environment. In the case of the divine Consciousness, the past actual world is everything that has ever happened in the universe—a universe which, as Whitehead suggests, has no absolute temporal beginning. We humans, along with other animals and perhaps even living cells, exist somewhere in between.
We are between God and the quantum events—not in a spatial sense, but in scope and intensity of experience. Unlike quantum events, we inherit a richly layered past: bodily, emotional, social, and historical. Unlike the divine Consciousness, we do not prehend the entire universe. Our experience is partial, situated, and finite. And yet, like both, we participate in the ongoing work of the universe: receiving the past, integrating it, and contributing something new.
We are intermediaries in the cosmos—finite centers of experience, inheriting much, grasping little, and yet adding something new.
The Ambiguity and Danger of Creativity
This does not mean that the outcomes of our momentary acts of winging it—of creating something new—are always good, or even within our conscious control. Truth be told, they can be destructive, even evil, in the sense of falling far short of the ideal of love. By love I mean, as Thomas Jay Oord puts it, “to act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being.” It is obvious that sometimes our creativity is quite the opposite of love.
Witness the harsh word spoken in anger that wounds rather than heals; the impulsive act of cruelty or neglect; the carefully crafted lie that manipulates another for personal gain; the systems of exploitation that are themselves ongoing products of human decisions, habits, and imagination; and, in its most extreme forms, brutal physical acts of violence in which bodies themselves are harmed, broken, or destroyed. Even on a smaller scale, we see it in everyday failures of empathy—in moments when we close ourselves off, refuse to listen, or respond defensively rather than generously.
In each case, something new is indeed being created—but it is a form of becoming that diminishes rather than enriches the well-being of others and the wider world. Creativity, in this sense, is morally ambiguous: it is the power to shape what becomes, for better or for worse.
Improvisation as Love in Action
What, then, is constructive creativity?
Here the words of Yo-Yo Ma are especially helpful. In endorsing Stephen Nachmanovitch’s The Art of Is, Yo-Yo Ma writes: “An improvisation is a co-creation that arises out of listening and mutual attentiveness, out of a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity… a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, unprecedented and unrepeatable… an antidote to hate.”
Constructive creativity, in this light, is not merely the production of something new. It is the emergence of novelty through attentive relationship. It arises from listening—to others, to the past, to the situation at hand—and from a willingness to be shaped by what is heard. It is co-creative rather than isolated, participatory rather than dominating—co-creative with the world and co-creative with God.
It is, in the deepest sense, winging it in a spirit of love.
Constructive and Destructive Creativity
Thus we find ourselves needing to recognize a difference between constructive creativity and destructive creativity—between creating on the fly in ways that contribute to the well-being of individual beings and the wider world, and creating on the fly in ways that result in suffering, fragmentation, and harm.
This distinction is not always clear to us. Our judgments are partial, our knowledge limited, and the consequences of our actions often exceed our intentions. And yet, despite this ambiguity, the distinction remains meaningful and necessary. We make it not because we possess perfect insight, but because we are called to orient our creativity toward love.
Divine Creativity and the Lure of Love
Is this also the case for the universal Consciousness? Is it true for God?
The tradition of open and relational theology suggests that it is. This Consciousness is, as Thomas Jay Oord proposes, a “universal Spirit of love” through which the universe itself is continually created—again and again, moment by moment—with the aim that all beings might flourish. It belongs to the very nature of God to be loving; which means that love is part of the very definition of love. This is not a sentimental love. It is not about tenderness alone, But it is about flourishing. The divine Consciousness in whose life the universe unfolds - like embryos within womb, like fish within an ocean - is on the side of life. Its creativity is bonded with the universe and with each center of experience, each sentient being.
This Consciousness, this love-energy, is not the whole of the universe but part of the very fabric of the universe. It can be understood as a force for good at work in the universe, or as a divine You who holds the universe together, or both, or neither. It is beyond the universe yet also within the universe as a lure toward the loving expression of spontaneity. And yet this divine creativity is not one-sided or unilateral. It is a relational creativity that works with the improvisational becoming of the universe. In this sense, even God “wings it”—not out of ignorance, but out of faithfulness to a world that is itself unfinished.
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“Stephen Nachmanovitch’s The Art of Is is a philosophical meditation on living, living fully, living in the present. To the author, an improvisation is a co-creation that arises out of listening and mutual attentiveness, out of a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. It is a product of the nervous system, bigger than the brain and bigger than the body; it is a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, unprecedented and unrepeatable. Drawing from the wisdom of the ages, The Art of Is not only gives the reader an inside view of the states of mind that give rise to improvisation, it is also a celebration of the power of the human spirit, which — when exercised with love, immense patience, and discipline — is an antidote to hate.”
— Yo-Yo Ma, cellist
— Yo-Yo Ma, cellist
Winging It: Improv’s Power & Peril in the Time of AI & Trump (Spring, 2024) is Randy Fertel’s third book, his second on improvisation. Creating something impromptu and without effort challenges our assumption that everything of value depends upon long study, tradition, and hard work. Improvisation comes to disrupt all that. The gesture all improvisations share—I will create this on the fly, or as Donald Trump has it, my gut knows more than many brains—defies rationality and elevates embodied emotions, instinct, and intuition. Claiming to be free of serious purpose, improvisation only pursues pleasure. Or, so it says. Through the lens of neuroscience, bioevolution, and well-known cultural texts, Winging It explores the links among the many disciplines improv informs—from Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” to the hip-hop masterpiece Hamilton. It defines what connects Kerouac’s On the Road, rock and roll, improv comedy, Fred Astaire’s tap, detective fiction, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, psychedelics, hookup culture, AI, even politics—in particular, the reign of the Improviser-in-Chief