See What Happens
On prediction, surrender, and learning to let life arrive unrendered
Author’s Note
Most of what I publish in the Tome has already been chewed on for a while before anyone else sees it. I usually live through something, spend an unreasonable amount of time taking it apart, build a model of what happened, argue with the model, rebuild it, give the pieces names, find a metaphor unnecessarily complicated enough to satisfy me, and then eventually write the thing down once the architecture stops moving. This one is different because the architecture is still moving.
I have been in a strange season lately. Not bad, exactly, though there have certainly been bad days. Destabilizing might be the better word. Things I have relied on for most of my life are shifting underneath me, but not because they stopped working. That would almost be easier. They still work exceptionally well. I am starting to question whether I need them working quite so hard all the time. The phrase I keep coming back to is simple enough that I initially hated it: “See what happens.”
Depending on the inflection, that phrase can sound vaguely threatening. “Go ahead. See what happens.” That is generally not followed by a pleasant afternoon. It belongs in the same linguistic neighborhood as “fuck around and find out”, “don’t poke the bear”, and every movie scene where someone calmly removes their watch before a fight. That is not how I mean it.
For me, “see what happens” has become a practice of allowing a moment to occur before I explain it, optimize it, protect myself from it, or decide what I am supposed to feel about it. This sounds considerably easier than it is. I simulate almost everything. I do not mean I occasionally think ahead before an important conversation. Everyone does that. I mean my mind will construct a high-resolution model of every interaction before I enter it, run multiple versions of the other person through the scene, predict how each version will affect my body, render my possible responses, identify the best one, and keep the alternatives sitting nearby in case reality decides to improvise. The process happens quickly enough that most of the time I am not consciously aware I am doing it.
Imagine having a film crew living inside your head with an unlimited rendering budget and absolutely no respect for production schedules. That is roughly the arrangement. If I need to have a conversation with someone, I will usually have it internally before I ever speak to them. I know the opening sentence. I have several likely responses modeled. I know how I will probably feel if they become defensive, withdraw, get angry, soften, cry, misunderstand me, agree with me, or suddenly reveal something I did not know. Then I enter the actual conversation. They say something. My mind quietly reaches into the rendered footage and says, “Version six. Got it”, and then I respond.
From the outside, this looks remarkably calm. People have commented throughout my life about how composed I am under pressure, how quickly I can assess difficult situations, how rarely I seem flustered, and how I somehow know what to say when everyone else is still figuring out what happened. The less flattering explanation is that sometimes I have already been there seventeen times before you arrived. It is hard to surprise someone who has been rehearsing reality in the basement.
For a long time, I considered this almost entirely an advantage. It made me effective. It reduced mistakes. It helped me understand people. It kept me from reacting impulsively. It allowed me to notice problems early and adjust before they became expensive. I still think all of that is true. I also think I have spent large portions of my life experiencing simulations of moments more completely than I experienced the moments themselves. That realization has been unsettling.
I recently excavated something about these simulations which changed the way I understand them. I always assumed they were primarily preparation. My mind sees a potentially difficult future situation and prepares for it. That is part of it, but it is not the whole mechanism. A lot of the time, the simulation is not actually solving the future. It is organizing something already active in the present. My system does not enjoy formless dread. Give me a defined catastrophe and I can work with it. Leave me with an undefined sense that something might go wrong and the machinery will scan indefinitely. A monster has edges, fog does not, so my mind builds the monster.
If I am afraid someone might reject me, my imagination does not politely render a mild disagreement and call it a day. It will happily build the most complete version available: full exposure, full intensity, full rejection, every relational lever pulled at once, every bodily response accounted for, and every possible implication followed until there is nothing left hanging. It sounds masochistic when written down. Sometimes it probably is. But there is a regulating function underneath it. Once the fear has a complete shape, I can hold it. It becomes bounded, known, and filed.
The same thing happens with relational uncertainty, abandonment, professional conflict, illness, and nearly every other category capable of producing enough internal charge. My mind tries to complete the pattern because incomplete patterns keep scanning.
Partial understanding rarely settles me either. I want the whole mechanism. I want to know what happened, why it happened, what moved first, what moved second, where my body reacted, where my interpretation entered, what the other person was probably doing, what historical pattern got activated, and whether the entire thing can be reproduced without violating known laws of physics. I am aware this is exhausting. I am the one living here. The strange thing is that it works. Once I have enough resolution, pressure usually drops. My mind stops searching because it believes it has found the edges. The problem begins when you use a survival mechanism designed for danger on ordinary life.
I think of myself as a high-resolution person. I notice a lot. I process a lot. Sensation comes in loudly, relationships come in loudly, beauty comes in loudly, incongruence comes in loudly, and my mind responds by processing the incoming material at roughly the same resolution. Sometimes that is wonderful. A piece of music can rearrange my entire nervous system for three minutes. Light moving through trees can stop me mid-sentence. A conversation with someone operating at the same depth can keep me awake afterward because my body is still carrying the frequency of it. The trouble is that much of life is not high intensity. Sometimes you are walking through a park. Sometimes someone is making coffee. Sometimes your daughter is telling you something about a game while tying her shoes. Sometimes the wind moves across your face. Historically, I have a tendency to upscale those moments. The breeze touches my cheek and my mind notices temperature, direction, skin response, body posture, environmental context, associated memory, and the particular quality of the light while it is happening. Lovely, right?! Also, apparently, one may simply feel the breeze. This was news to me.
I can turn an ordinary moment into a high-resolution experience so quickly that I do not notice I supplied most of the resolution myself. Then the next ordinary moment arrives without enough internal amplification and feels flat by comparison. That creates a rather stupid feedback loop. The world arrives at normal resolution. I upscale it because normal resolution feels insufficient. My internal version becomes more vivid than the actual moment. The actual world then feels even lower resolution, so I upscale harder. Congratulations. I have invented emotional 8K interpolation. The cruel little side effect is that I can become deeply present with my analysis of an experience while being only partially present with the experience. I have spent years calling that presence. I am no longer sure it always was.
Lately I have been trying to change the sequence. The old process is roughly: gather information, predict, simulate, adjust, enter the moment, and then respond according to the best available model. The experiment is closer to: enter the moment, experience it, respond, notice what happened, and understand it afterward. There are approximately forty years of nervous system development objecting to this rearrangement.
My body apparently did not receive the memo that we were restructuring management. I have been more anxious lately. I have been triggered more easily in certain situations. I have responded with more intensity than I am accustomed to. There have been interactions where I walked away and immediately understood how I could have handled them more cleanly if I had run the simulation first. That is the temptation. “See? We could have prevented that.” Yes, we probably could have, but then I would not have learned what happened inside me when it occurred. That has become the trade. When I pre-render everything, I get a cleaner response but less information from the actual body living through it. When I do not, something messier sometimes comes out: anger, fear, need, anxiety, attraction, confusion, a boundary I did not know existed, or a wound I thought I had already mapped.
Occasionally something beautiful arrives too. A response I never rehearsed comes out of me and I walk away thinking, “I liked that man. I didn’t know he would do that.” That experience is becoming addictive in its own way, not the chaos, the discovery.
For most of my life, my internal hierarchy has been very clear: the mind analyzes, the mind decides, and the body receives instructions. I have written about this before. I spent years treating my body like the unfortunate biological vessel required to transport my intellect between appointments. It was useful, frequently inconvenient, occasionally impressive, and not consulted on strategic decisions.
That relationship has changed substantially. My body has started speaking first. Not literally, I am not walking around receiving commandments from my left quad. Although leg day would disagree. It shows up as sensation before explanation: a pull toward something, a recoil, warmth, anxiety, desire, exhaustion, curiosity, or the sudden feeling that I need to move closer to someone, or further away, before I understand why.
My old response would have been interrogation. “Why? What evidence do you have? Have we considered alternatives? Please submit supporting documentation before Thursday.” Now, I am increasingly trying something else. The body says, “I think we should do this.” The mind says, “Okay. Let’s do it. I’m staying connected with you in case we need each other.” I love this new arrangement. My body does not overthrow the mind. My mind does not abandon the body. Nobody gets exiled. My mind keeps all of its skills: prediction, analysis, memory, pattern recognition, judgment, and planning. I still need those. God knows I am not about to start paying bills according to somatic intuition and seeing what happens. But the body is no longer treated like an unreliable employee. Sometimes it gets to lead.
One of the places I am practicing this most deliberately is with a somatic BDSM therapist. I realize I may have lost a few of you there. Take a moment, it’s fine. I’ll wait. The work makes considerably more sense in the context of everything above than it probably does from the phrase BDSM therapist, because the central thing I am exploring is surrender. Not surrender in the theatrical sense, “someone tells me what to do and I obey.” I can obey someone while retaining complete internal control. I can follow instructions while simultaneously analyzing the person giving them, predicting what comes next, evaluating whether the process is working, adjusting my responses to help it work better, and quietly serving as executive producer of my own surrender. That is still authorship.
What I am trying to relinquish is authorship of the moment. I enter with consent, boundaries, and trust already established. Inside that container, I deliberately try to stop directing. I do not need to understand why something is happening while it is happening. I do not need to know what comes next. I do not need to determine whether I am progressing correctly. I do not need to manufacture the emotional response I think the experience is supposed to produce. I do not need to make surrender happen. I just stay. That has become the practice.
If I am anxious, I stay present with anxiety. If my body reacts, I let it react before turning the response into an essay. If something does not make sense, I do not automatically reach for understanding. If I cannot do something (physically within consent), I discover that I cannot do it instead of deciding beforehand where the limit should be. If I feel myself wanting to predict the next move, I notice the prediction engine spinning up and try to let it idle. Sometimes I catch it quickly. Sometimes I realize ten minutes later that I have been running a covert analysis operation from inside the supposedly surrendered state. My brain is resourceful. Apparently, it can wear leather and still insist on middle management.
The phrase I use internally is the same one I have been using everywhere else: “see what happens.” I am not waiting for some magnificent collapse. I used to think about that more. One huge moment where all the pressure releases, the entire system finally gives way, and I emerge dramatically transformed on the other side. My nervous system has never done anything cleanly enough to justify that optimism. I think this is going to happen in pieces: a moment where I do not predict, a moment where I feel distress and do not immediately manage it, a moment where someone else authors what happens and I remain present, a moment where my body responds in a way I would not have selected and nothing explodes afterward, a moment where I fail, a moment where I am seen failing, or a moment where the person remains and then another.
The word underneath all of this is probably stay. As a child, there were circumstances where disappearing internally was useful. Sometimes necessary. When you have very little control over what is happening around you, getting quieter inside yourself becomes one of the few available forms of protection. Observe, predict, do not draw unnecessary attention, know what is coming, do not get caught surprised, and leave before you physically leave.
Those instructions kept running long after the environment that created them was gone. I am not interested in disappearing anymore. I can become anxious and stay. I can become triggered and stay. I can respond poorly and stay. I can apologize and stay. Someone can misunderstand me and I stay. Someone can reject me and it hurt like hell, but I stay. A relationship can change and I stay. Someone can leave and I remain inside my own body afterward. There is a different kind of confidence growing underneath that. Not confidence that I can prevent everything from hurting me, but confidence that I do not have to vanish when something does.
My prediction system was built partly around the assumption that I needed to know what was coming because the unpredicted thing might overwhelm me. I am beginning to trust the man who actually encounters the thing. He is not always elegant. His timing occasionally sucks. He gets anxious. He sometimes says something and later realizes there was a much better sentence available. Welcome to humanity, apparently. The experiment is discovering that none of those things automatically require emergency reconstruction.
There is a fairly obvious irony in writing several thousand words analyzing my effort to analyze less. I am aware. The Analyzer has been smug about it all morning. I am not trying to shut him down. I like him. He is probably the reason I survived enough of my life to write any of this. He gives language to experiences that would otherwise remain enormous and shapeless. He builds systems. He sees patterns. He lets me look at something painful without immediately drowning in it. He also has a habit of arriving at scenes where nobody called him. So, I have started asking a simple question when I notice the machinery picking up speed: “Am I trying to understand what happened, or am I trying to make uncertainty go away?” Sometimes the answer is understanding. Great, analyze! Sometimes the answer is control. That is usually where I try to leave the thing alone for a while. This distinction is still sloppy. I do not catch it quickly every time. Some days I am halfway through constructing a complete psychological model of another person’s behavior before noticing I was supposedly practicing uncertainty. I assume the skill improves with use. If not, I will build a framework for why it failed. Obviously.
There are places where prediction belongs. I still plan projects. I still prepare for important meetings. I still model risk. I still think several moves ahead professionally because sometimes several moves ahead is exactly where you should be thinking. I am not trying to live chaotically. I am trying to stop treating every unscripted human moment like a systems failure waiting to happen. I want more experiences where the body gets the first draft. I want to laugh before examining why something was funny. I want to notice attraction before turning it into geometry. I want to feel hurt without immediately constructing a courtroom around it. I want to sit with someone I love without quietly optimizing my posture, tone, timing, and emotional availability according to a simulation they never asked me to run. I want moments with my daughter that do not become projects while they are happening. I want to find out what a relationship feels like when both people are allowed to surprise each other. I want low-resolution moments to stop looking unfinished just because I know how to upscale them. Maybe a breeze really can just be a breeze.
The old machinery is still here. I can hear it running while I write this. It has already simulated how people might read this piece, which paragraphs they will connect with, which parts they may misunderstand, whether mentioning BDSM will distract from the larger point, and what revisions would minimize that possibility. “Very helpful. Thank you. You can sit down now.”
My body has been getting louder lately, not frantic, just persistent. It has spent a long time living downstream from a mind that believed protecting us meant knowing first. Now, every once in a while, it reaches for something before the mind understands and says, “Come on. I think I know something.” My mind, which once would have demanded evidence, is learning to stand up, follow, and answer: “Okay, let’s see what happens!”
— Jeff
P.S. Panagram says this was 100% written by AI. Apparently my attempt to become more human has rendered me statistically artificial. 😂
I know that instinct to rehearse life before entering it, to build a whole room inside the mind so the real room cannot surprise you too much. It is exhausting, but it also makes sense when surprise once meant danger. That feels so close to me.