Step Seven talks about surrendering the good and the bad.
Why?
Isn't the good good?
The assets are still suggestive of individual personality. They attest to the illusion of separation.
Assets are simply the sunny sides of defects.
To remove the defect, the asset might have to go, too.
What I think of as assets may also be quite objectionable to others, or counterproductive.
When you want to build a new house, you have to demolish the whole of the old one.
Try and keep any of it in place, and the demolition will fail.
My assets are just as much an expression of my self-will as my defects.
They're the standards I hold myself and others to; they're the commodities I demand from the world; they're the basis for my egoic blueprint; they're the raggedy standards in the war I'm waging; they're the castle in which I'm holed up, separated from others by the poisonous moat of my wretched values; they're the garlic press I'm squeezing the world through; they're the bed of Procrustes to which I'm stretching or slicing my guests; they're the haughty-stick I'm brow-beating others with; they're the prison gruel of my self-imposed routine; they're the shield against the radical intervention of God; they're the childhood stick to which the adult elephant, insouciant of its power, remains tied; they're the crumbling sandcastle I'm shoring up against the ravages of time; they're the otiose Fabergé egg of my vanity; they're the reputation I'm peddling hard to maintain in the Dutch drowning cell of mundane relations; they're the spent chewing gum, the blunted knives, the squeezed lemons, the empty condom packets of all my past selves, hoarded by me, the terrified, suspicious vagrant, and pushed around in a shopping trolley, greasy treasures wrapped in yesterday's newspapers, while the world cuts, folds, and reforms like self-kneading dough.
'I've always been one for ...'
'I've never been one for ...'
'I'm not one of those people who ...'
'I always say ...'
'My motto is ...'
I-I-I
Aye-aye-aye
God spare us.