Surrender...

"Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstance entails continuous surrender."
-Stephen Nachmanovich from Free Play

Yes. The unwillingness to surrender. I know it well. I think I'm getting better at this part, but there is still much work to be done. I mean, isn't the real reason that we all get irritated with people is that our own unwillingness to surrender under certain circumstances keeps us from having more than one point of view? Example: You're in line at the supermarket and the person in front of you has, seemingly, never used an ATM card in their life and cannot for the life of them figure out how to work the machine. Do you A: Surrender to the moment and figure out a way to be anything but irritated? or B: Do you spend the next five minutes AND the half hour after that thinking "JerK! !@##$%! I'm usually B. Big fucking B. So, if I can't do it under relatively mundane circumstances, how can I hope to do it on the dance floor or on stage? Can't. Because the person I'm now faced with is ten times worse than the ATM guy. It's me. The neocortex me. The annoying bastard in my head who never shuts up. He's the one who keeps me from surrendering. It's not ME, it's HIM!

But I have this theory that if I can relate to every situation as practicing improvisation, then the little bastard upstairs will eventually quiet down and may even go to sleep for long periods of time. Now, I've known that for a long time, but the difference between knowing something and putting it in to practice is as huge as something, uh, really huge. So, I'm commiting to push myself in this area for the next thirty days and we'll see what comes of it.

Is it just me or am I starting to sound nuts?