What it does to the wish

There's one more thing the cycle does, and it's to the wish itself.

Each rerun makes the wish larger. Not on purpose. It's that the wish has to make up for the year in which it didn't happen, and a wish that has three failed years behind it needs to be big enough to justify a fourth attempt. So "walk more" becomes "get properly fit" becomes "run the half". "Write on Tuesdays" becomes "finish the novel by summer". The size that makes it feel worth trying again is the size that, chapter 8 argued, puts the floor out of reach. The wish grows and the Tuesday doesn't, and the gap between them is where the drop lives.

And at the same time the wish gets sore. It starts as something you're happy to say and ends as something you flinch from. The running shoes by the door in chapter 12 are a small example. The wish as a whole becomes the same thing, a place in your head you avoid, and you can't plan for a thing you avoid looking at. By the fifth year the wish is both the largest and the least examined thing on your list, and those two facts feed each other.

I'd put it this way, as my reading. The first time you set the wish it was a hope. By the fourth it's a debt. You owe it to yourself, you're behind on the payments, and January is the day the demand arrives. That's a bad thing to feel about a run.

The way out isn't to want it less. It's to take the wish off the list of things you owe and put it back among the things you'd like, and then, separately, to write one Tuesday sentence about it. The wish can be as large as it likes once it isn't the plan. Half marathon, novel, fluent Spanish, all fine, as pictures to have on the wall. The plan is fifteen minutes on Tuesday. The wish and the plan are different objects, and the whole trouble came from using one as the other.

The three chapters that follow are the method. It's short, because the method isn't the hard part. The hard part was believing that the wish was one.