One quiet stretch a day

The next three chapters are the method, and the method is small, because it asks for one thing to be taken out of the day rather than anything put in.

Pick one. The walk to the car. The shower. The kettle and the ten minutes around it. The drive home. Pick the stretch that's easiest to leave empty, not the hardest, because the first week is about finding out that a quiet stretch ends and nothing bad happens in it. For most people the walk is right. It has a beginning and an end and legs to keep the itch company.

Nothing on. Not quieter music. Not a calmer podcast. Nothing. The headphones stay in the bag, the radio stays off, the phone stays in the pocket with the screen dark. A quiet stretch with a thing in it is a filled stretch with a better excuse.

Ten minutes, or the length of the stretch. If the walk is four minutes, it's four. If the shower is eight, it's eight. Don't extend it. The point isn't endurance. It's that the stretch is empty, and an empty four minutes does the job an empty forty would, in a smaller way, and it's the smaller way that you'll do tomorrow.

Expect the itch. Chapter 3 said it's real and chapter 16 said it passes. In the first week it'll take most of the four minutes and you'll arrive at the car twitchy. That's the method working, because the itch is being allowed to happen and to end, and each time it ends the next one is shorter.

Let the drift. Don't direct it. Don't try to think about anything in particular or to think about nothing. Let the mind go where it goes. It'll go to the meeting and the email and the mother, as chapter 4 said, and that's the sorting, and it's what the stretch is for. If it goes somewhere useless, let it. It'll come back.

Notice one thing. Not as an exercise. Just once, on the walk, look at the street. There's a house, a tree, a person. You've been past them with a podcast on for a year. This is what goes missing, coming back, and the first time you see the street it'll be a small surprise.

If the stretch has to be shorter, make it shorter. A two-minute walk to the bus is a two-minute quiet stretch. The size doesn't matter in the first fortnight. The daily emptiness does.

Do it every day for a fortnight before anything else. The one stretch, empty, daily. Don't change the rest of the day yet. By the end of the fortnight the itch will be short and the drift will have produced at least one thought that finished, and that's the evidence you need for chapter 20.