The power of surprise

Recently i was running and saw what looked like a small block of wood or stone on the path. I went to kick it out of the way, but when i swung my foot and struck it, i felt no impact at all. It turned out to be a piece of dark-colored styrofoam, practically weightless. The surprise resulting from the discrepancy between what my mind expect to happen and what actually happened woke me up.

What would it be like if adults were to arrange things so as to induce a constantly occuring series of discrepant events? My hunch is that, if we could do this, we would be assuming the mind of a little child. Young children have few expectations; they've not been around long enough to form the habit.

Surprise always connects us with the exact present. Its capacity to bring us to the here-and-now bears exploring. A surprise, by definition, is not what we expect. Many events in the constant white water context which defeat and exhaust people are what we describe as 'disappointments'. What is a disappointing experience? It is a time when something we expected to happen failed to happen. When we are disappointed, we're rarely aware of the fact that somewhere back there, we set ourselves up for this by starting to expect.

Stop expecting and you've cut the disappointment off the root. Stop expecting.

"wherever you go, there you are"