four of swords, and the evening you did not decide

TUESDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER

/ pick an option

choose one before you read anything else

three today, and take whichever one your eye stopped on. no weighing it up.

one. the weekend with nothing in it. two. the television that goes on before your coat is off. three. the room you have not changed since it stopped being needed.

hold it. the card comes first, yours is at the bottom.

the four of swords is the pause that repairs something, and the reason it turns up for women living on their own is that the same empty afternoon can do two completely different jobs depending on what you do with it.

an alone house is a recovery room or a waiting room. the furniture is identical. the difference is whether the time in it is being used for anything, and rest counts as a use.

waiting is the one to watch for. it looks restful from the outside and it is not restful at all, because some part of you stays switched on for an event that is not coming. that is what makes an evening long without anything actually happening in it.

tuesday is early enough in the week to change the use rather than the hours. the hours are the same either way. what you are doing inside them is the only variable you have, and it is a larger one than it sounds.

what is worth leaning into today: rest you have actually chosen. a decided evening in beats an accidental one by a distance.

what is worth staying away from: leaving the shape of the evening to whatever happens. nothing happens, and then the evening was about that.

my advice for today: decide the evening at five rather than at nine. one line, written down if it helps. even deciding to do very little is a decision, and it changes what nine o'clock feels like.

what do you do with a tuesday evening when nobody expects anything of you. i am more curious about the honest answer than the good one.

option one. the weekend with nothing in it

friday afternoon arrives and there is nothing in the diary until monday, and depending on the week that is either the best news you have had or a stretch of open ground you are quietly dreading. both are normal and they alternate.

the thing worth doing is putting one fixed point in it. not a full programme, one anchor. a class, a market, a walk you take at the same time. an empty weekend with a single fixed point in it behaves completely differently to an entirely open one, because everything else arranges itself around the anchor instead of drifting.

option two. the television that goes on before the coat is off

it fills the room with other voices, which is exactly what it is for, and there is nothing wrong with that.

the part worth noticing is whether it goes on before you have decided anything. background noise as a choice is company. background noise as a reflex means you have not had a quiet room in months, and a great many women find their own thoughts unfamiliar and slightly alarming after a long stretch of that. try twenty minutes of the house as it actually sounds, once, and see whether it is as bad as you expect. it usually is not, and what turns up in it is usually useful.

option three. the room you have not changed

the box room, the study, the one that was theirs. it has been a shrine or a storage cupboard for a while now, and neither of those is really a room.

this is not a nudge to clear it out, and anybody who tells you to is moving too fast. but consider giving it one function that belongs to you. a chair and a lamp. a table with your own things on it. you are not erasing anyone by using a room, and houses that go on holding rooms for people who left tend to get smaller around the woman still living in them.