Alright! Back to basics! The basis of our physical life as humans, it seems, is to grow through experience or to just simply die without sensorial pleasures and conversely, discomforts, whether plainly in the mind or purely in the body. All events in one's life are present in the moment to be experienced and it is up to the perceiver to create, learn, and grow from these experiences. We exist as sponges to any and all conscious or unconscious experience through all of our senses; these are things that cannot be denied simply because all the tools we have to detect reality are channeled through our vehicle in this outer world filtered through the mind. We believe things to exist, therefore we experience them as closely as possible, or not. The philosophical flipside to that coin is that we experience things firstly, and then determine their reality. Either way, we must experience something, no?

With a little hope, we all learn from the things that we experience in our lives and thus most knowledge for us is, as human beings (doubly so for the actor) experiential. It is the constantly flowing fountain we extract our sustenance from. The more we experience the greater the well we draw from. The more we seek, the more we find. Any working actor will tell you that whatever their life has taught them has had a profoundly impacting effect in their possible melding with the portrayal of their characters. There is a saying that is sometimes used to describe this, "Reaching into a fresh bag of apples". Obviously the apples symbolizing the new ideas and on the other hand, there is another term for the antithesis to new ideas, which goes "Reaching into the old bag of tricks". Young or inexperienced actors fall into this trap routinely because it always seems much easier to do what we know how to do as opposed to discovering new moments to experience.

Awareness of all the senses, never taking one moment for granted, or simply remaining thoroughly observant are only a few of the simple keys to allowing yourself to draw the most of every second living in the experience of the moment. Experience the experiences to be had in every breath. Part of the actor's job is to remain supple, pliant, and able to shift into the new moment with every differing experience as if it were a new moment every time… even if it's the 75th performance or rehearsal, it always has to come from a fabricated and truthfully believed in new moment.

Another part of the job entails another aspect of experience… the ability to listen with fresh ears to the lines being said, the conversation, the issue, the action, and the sub-text, all of the subtleties the scene partners in the moment might be sharing. There are many schools of acting theory, masters of many experiments, that have helped find the different tools available to the director and actor alike to better serve the freshness of a scene or portrayal. Take Johnny Depp as the new Willy Wonka for example, pretty fresh, pretty new, a completely different approach to the one taken by Gene Wilder, the originator of the classic role. That is just a miniscule example of the experience one actor brought to a tried and true character of everybody's childhood memories. There are millions of actors around the globe having these experiences, the having to re-vamp an old role, yet having to make it fresh. The greatest facilitator to this dilemma is to simply extract from the well of experience your life has prepared you with as the set of tools that you will use once approaching a role.

Try and remember the scents, the sounds, the sights in your life when next you approach a role and ask yourself: Has my character had similar experiences? What memories may we have in common experientially? Can I improvise on my fallible memories in this scene or have I have been dormant when these moments we might've shared came about? Ask yourself these vital questions and many such like them whenever cast in a role.

In experiencing the experiences to be had in any given situation in our lives, in being observant, from the mundane to the beatific, we can expand the number of gateways to achieving what we must as actors. Don't let a second slip past you… in the words of the infamous pop-icon movie character, Ferris Bueller… "Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."