John F Kennedy once said, “…time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

The fundamental principle of change is a truth that exists at all levels. On the macro level, the very notion that life will continue steadily on, the stars fixed in the sky, the planets neatly in their orbits, is an illusion brought on by the limited vision of our terribly short-lived human perspective.

On the individual level too, there is no stillness. Even what we consider the act of “standing-still” is the process of dozens of micro-adjustments per second, a continuous physical re-assessing of our relationship to gravity just to maintain the illusion of staying in one place.

The same is true in our relationships to one another and how we form a sense of community. We are in perpetual motion, always shifting in a wobbly dance around each other and ourselves, each moment a reassessing of how we can maintain relative stability in our constantly shifting relationships.

The law of change states that “everything is in the process of becoming something else”. The question, then, is what will be the nature of that change and how will we navigate it?

As the composer and improviser Miller Wrenn says, “Improvisation is best understood as a metaphor of communal living, and the fundamental principle of that community is the navigation of change.” Compelled by the micro and macro models found in both cosmology and human relations, Miller looks for astronomic parallels to understand the essence of community.

The nature of planetary orbits, the unique patterns of binary and trinary stars, astronomical systems organized hierarchically or in highly unstable ‘trapezia’, the presence of ‘Cataclysmic variables’ leading to novas and supernovas, all find parallels in our interpersonal relationships. They search for stable orbits, shift to accommodate new variables or eject runaway stars, expand, resisting implosion, and suddenly collapse or explode. Sometimes both.

As an individual in these volatile communal systems, there is something deeply mysterious, and perhaps even sacred, to how we navigate change as a community. The community is a massive interactive network made from components of different sizes that balance together to create a living system with its own life, one greater than the sum of its individual parts. This ‘group consciousness’, an emergent phenomenon some theorists suggest might be present in all dynamic systems, both cosmological as well as biological, exists in a delicate dance between our identity as an individual and the emergent collective experience.

The opportunity and challenge of an improvisation based musical community is the mandate to remove the barriers that separate your activity as an isolated performer and enter into that larger group consciousness, letting go of our willful intentions and, as they say, “going with the flow”, letting the currents of the greater, emergent, macro-consciousness take over, an invisible hand playing the ensemble directly, shaping the sound.

And yet, falling 100% lock-step into the group mind might become musically uninteresting. The drama of a composition comes from the play between tension and release, expectation and surprise, consonance and dissonance. Just as a group of performers playing as disconnected individuals will produce a cacophony, achieving a complete hivemind lacking the spontaneous uncertainty that is only possible when in opposition to an “other”, will lose our attention as well.

When we become aware of this relational tension between the small and big self, the individual and the group, and learn to fully embrace both, we find an echo of the impossible math in modern christian theology; not a mid-point between two opposites but 100% individual and 100% collective at the same time, holding both ends of that binary together, simultaneously expanding and contracting, the macro and micro together in a new oneness, unity in diversity.

The truth is, whatever part of that spectrum we are experiencing, our place in it is always relational. no matter how far apart or seemingly individual, we expand and contract in relationship to each other. We are helplessly and forever interconnected, and every movement we make is affected by and affects those around us. We are an inevitability to each other.

Implosion isn’t just compulsory, it’s our natural, perpetual, joyful state of being.

Or, as the great musician Anthony Braxton would say, “Hurray for unity”.