Every day Sheila wished she could play that passage and each day faces the fact she can’t pull it off and curses herself. Tanner, her conductor friend, said once you master it something else occupies your mind the same way, and what bugged you about yourself in the first piece will equally bug you about yourself when you try the next. Something rang true about that. She wondered is the mind wired up to perpetuate self dissatisfaction? If that was true, if that was “natural” for humankind as a whole…then what does nature get out of creating a creature that believes it is a free thinker when in fact it is following the program designed for it- like a bee has to sting at unexpected swift movement or a dog has to chase a chipmunk. Tanner said if you can see that then you might short circuit the problem. If you know the fight will mount itself despite yourself, if it is inevitable then there might be a way to sidestep participating. That’s a whole other level of shadow boxing. There’s an advantage to climbing higher up the mountain, you can see more of what’s actually going on. It could even change your instincts or at least your attitude towards how they are triggered.