When you've reached again

It will happen, and often at first. You'll find the biscuit half eaten, or the phone in your hand in the queue, or the glass poured, and realise you never caught the flicker. Then the thought will come that you're back where you started.

One reach isn't the day. The list from the first week will show you what a day looks like now, and it isn't what it was. What happened was a flicker that got past the catch, which is what flickers have been doing all your life, and one of them did it again.

Name it late. The word works after the reach as well as before it. "That was flat." "That was awkward." Say it, and score what's left, and notice that the remedy didn't do much, which is the alibi seen from the other side. The feeling's probably about the same as it would have been, and now there's a second feeling as well. That's information, and it's the last lesson the alibi has to teach.

Work out which flicker you missed. Was it a place where the remedy was already in your hand? A time of day that's always a reach? A feeling you don't have a word for yet? Each of those has a small fix. Move the phone. Watch that hour. Find the word.

If it was a bad one, a whole evening on the sofa with the bottle and the phone and the delivery app, then name that too, in the morning, and score what's left. What's usually left is the feeling that started it, unchanged, plus a second feeling that's bigger than usual. Neither of those is a reason to give up the method. The first is the thing to ask what it wants. The second is the thing to ride, because a verdict is a wave like any other and passes like one.

No streaks. Don't count reach-free days, because a streak makes one biscuit feel like the end of something. Count waves ridden, if you count anything, and let the reach be a mark against a long column of them.

One more thing about the morning after a bad evening. The list of what you reached for will look long and the second feeling will want to read it as a verdict. Read it as a list of flickers instead. Each item was a feeling that arrived and didn't get named, and each one is on tomorrow's list to catch. That's not a consolation. It's what the list is for.

And carry on the same afternoon. Not tomorrow. The next flicker will be along within the hour, and it's the next flicker that the rule is about.