The blank day

Whichever way you take, you'll have days without the treat, and the first one is the one that decides whether the rest happen. So here's how to run it, and what to expect, so it doesn't run you.

Pick the day. Not a bad day, not a Friday, not the day of something difficult. An ordinary Tuesday or Wednesday, decided the day before. The point is to see what an ordinary evening is like without the daily, and you can't see that on a day that isn't ordinary.

Fill the hour. Six o'clock will arrive and reach for the treat, and if there's nothing there but the hour, it'll be a long hour. So put something in it that isn't a substitute. Not a different drink in the same glass, not a different snack, not the phone instead of the episode. Something that uses the hour. A walk, a call to someone you've been meaning to ring, cooking something rather than ordering it, twenty minutes of a thing you're learning. Chapter 15's list is as good as any. The hour needs a new use, not a new filling.

Expect the flat evening. Chapter 7 described it. Somewhere between six and eight there'll be a stretch that feels hollow, and the words will come, "I could just have one", and they'll sound like reason. It isn't. It's the expecting with nothing to settle on. Let it be flat. It's information. This is what the hour feels like without the lid on, and it tells you how much the daily was covering. The flatness peaks and passes, usually before bed, and the next morning is ordinary.

Don't count. One blank day isn't a streak and it isn't a test of character. It's a look at the evening. If you have the treat the next day, chosen, that's fine and is the method working. If the blank day was bleak rather than flat, if it wasn't hollow but heavy and the heaviness was there before six as well, read the last paragraph of chapter 15 and the preface, because that's not what a missing treat feels like.

Then do another. The second blank day is easier than the first and the fourth is an evening. Once you've had three or four, the hour has stopped expecting, and the two ways out in chapter 18 become easy, because the treat is no longer arriving on its own. You're choosing it. That was the point.