When you've spent the evening on it again

It'll happen. A message will land at nine at night and you'll be three hours into the reading before you remember there's a method. Or you'll do the other account and not believe a word of it and go on with the evening anyway. Then the thought will come that the habit is stronger than the book.

It isn't. It's faster, which is different. The reading has had a lifetime of practice and the other account has had a month, and speed is what practice gives. What happened is that the reading got in first and stayed, and you noticed at midnight rather than at nine. Noticing at midnight is still noticing, and last year you'd have noticed on Thursday.

Write the other account late. It works at midnight. It works the next morning. Put the reading down in a sentence and the other account beside it and look at the two, and the evening you've already spent is spent, but tomorrow isn't.

Work out which reading got through. Was it a message at night, when you were tired and the reading runs fastest? Then messages after nine get read in the morning. Was it a person you always read? Then that person gets the check at the door before anything else. Was it a topic, work or your body or money, that's always about you? Then that topic gets the other account written in advance, because you know it's coming.

And be fair to yourself about the size of it. An evening spent on a reading is an evening, not a relapse into a life. Last year it was most evenings. This month it was one. The habit hasn't come back. It came round once, which habits do, and it found a person who noticed it, which is not the person it used to find.

No streaks. Don't count evenings without a reading. The reading will come every day for a long time, because it's how the mind is built, and a streak turns a normal Tuesday into a failure. Count checks made and accounts written, and let one long evening be one line in a list that's mostly shorter.