Judge today from the same distance

This is the chapter that turns the argument round, and it's the one most people find changes things.

Ask what will glow. Take today, or this year, and ask what the golden version of it will contain in twenty years. The fade will run. The dentist will go and the work thing will go and what will remain is whatever was good, so find it now. The allotment. The child at this age, who won't be this age again. The friend you see on Thursdays. The kitchen you complain about, which in twenty thirty-six will be "the old kitchen" and missed. There's a photograph being taken this year that will be on a fridge in twenty years, and you can guess which one.

Write today's good bit. One line, most days, of the thing that will survive the fade. Not a gratitude exercise, and I'd avoid the word. A record, for the same reason the problems column is a record. In twenty years the golden version of now will have taken the problems out. The line keeps the good in, so that the whole record of now exists somewhere too.

Write the letter from the future. Once, on a quiet evening, write to yourself from twenty thirty-six, looking back at this year as the good old days. What does the letter miss? What does it say it would give anything to have back? Most people find the letter easy to write and hard to read, because it's true, and because it makes clear that the present is somebody's golden version already. It's just that the somebody is later.

Compare like with like. When the sigh compares today with then, put today's Tuesday next to then's Tuesday, or today's best afternoon next to then's. Not the Tuesday against the beach. The golden version cheats on this every time and the correction is to notice which two things are being compared and pick two that match.

Judge the people at the same distance too. Your partner, seen from twenty years off, will be a person you were lucky to have, with faults that have faded and a laugh you can still hear. You can see them that way now, if you choose the distance, and it changes the evening.

Say the sentence forwards. "It'll never be like this again." Said about today, it's true, and it's not a sigh. It's the reason to be here.