When you looked down again

You'll glance. A fortnight in, a month in, a year in. Someone will be telling you something and the phone will light and your eyes will go, and you'll catch yourself, or they'll catch you.

The first thing to know is that one glance isn't the habit back. The habit was fifty glances a day with no awareness of any of them. One glance you noticed is the opposite of that. It's the habit surfacing where you can see it, and a seen glance is one you can end, which you do by looking up and saying "sorry, go on", as in chapter 18. That's the whole repair. Not a speech.

The second is that a bad evening isn't a bad month. If you've had a night of the old pattern, the phone on the arm of the sofa and the half-listen and the "mm", that's information. Something put the phone back within reach. Tiredness, usually, or a day that needed the twenty minutes from chapter 11 and didn't get them. Give the phone its twenty minutes tomorrow, on its own, before you walk in. Then put it in the hall.

The third is to ask which belief did it. Every glance has one of the chapters from 3 to 12 behind it. "It might be important" is the commonest, and the answer is that it'll ring. "I'm listening" is the next, and the answer is chapter 3. Find the belief, reread the chapter, and the glance loses its reason.

Don't keep a streak. A streak makes one glance a failure, and a failure makes the next one easier, because the record's spoiled anyway. There's no record. There's a rule, and an evening, and the phone in the hall, and that's tonight's whole job.

And don't apologise beyond the once. The other person doesn't need to be told how sorry you are or how hard you've been trying. They need your face back, and then they need to finish the story.