Despite the seamless ease and aplomb with which we go about our daily routines, the mind, behind the scenes, is managing affairs with a frantic anxiety: so much to-ing and fro-ing, so much inefficiency and wasted energy, and all because the course we take is no longer a matter of life and death which would require spirit, but largely one of decorum and propriety, which promises safety and security but delivers a slack and arbitrary conformity saturated with neurotic tension. And it's all unnecessary, largely generated by a cynical and cowardly decision to leak and waste all energy other than the minimum required to travel the pre-established groove; nothing left to leap clear and traverse a crest or take to the sky. The Other, not just another person but any novel situation that demands more from us, any event, represents the “irreducible and inappropriable surprise” necessary to jolt us from our routines of body and mind. The Other demands hospitality, demands that I break my usual routines and quickly adapt to their intrusion. This is the gift of the Other, a gift I could never give myself.