The headphones stay in the bag

You leave the house at ten past eight, some months on. The headphones are in the bag, where they live now, and the walk to the car is four minutes of the street. The house at the corner has scaffolding on it, and you noticed that on Tuesday, and today you notice the scaffolding's gone. Somewhere around the second lamp post the thing about the email finishes. You've had the first half of it for a week. The second half arrives on the pavement, whole, and you'll type it at your desk in three minutes.

The kettle boils in a quiet kitchen. The queue at the post office is a queue, and you look at the shop opposite, which has changed hands, and the man in front of you says something about the weather and you answer. In the car, the radio's off, and your daughter tells you about a thing at school that she wouldn't have told you over a programme, and you hear it, and ask a question, and she answers that too.

The podcasts are still in the app. You listened to one last night, sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, the whole episode, and when it ended the next one didn't start, and you sat for a minute with the episode in your head and then went to bed with the audiobook set to twenty minutes, and were asleep at eleven, and didn't wake at three. You remember the episode. You couldn't have said that a year ago about any of them.

There was a bored minute on Thursday, in the car park, properly bored, with the itch in it, and you stood there and were bored, and after a minute it turned into a thought about the friend you haven't rung since spring, and you rang her that evening, and that's what bored is for.

None of this is a transformation. You filled a walk last week without noticing until the car, and took the headphones out and finished the walk in quiet. The radio still goes on some evenings because you want it, and off when the programme ends. You listen to about a third of what you used to and could tell someone what was in it. And the year, so far, has gone slower than the last one, in the sense that you can remember it, and you've put that down to the quiet, because there's nothing else it could be.

If you take one thing from this book, take this. Tomorrow, leave the headphones in the bag and walk to the car with nothing on, and look at the street. That's the whole method. Everything else is detail.