March 25

Sometimes it's only your conversations with yourself that tell you something was settled long ago. You are still drafting objections to a change that has already taken effect, and holding conversations in which you finally get the last word. None of this changes the matter itself. Only your attention keeps coming back to the same spot.

The difficulty is that you can hardly recognise this state in advance. Resistance can be reasonable while something is still open; some things give way only because someone did not consent straight away. If you consent too soon, you can easily mistake your own convenience for equanimity. If you object for too long, you pass off your sense of injury as steadfastness.

Consenting doesn't mean approving, though. You can go on thinking a development is wrong and still stop contesting it afresh in every thought. Only then does it become clear what is possible under the new circumstances – perhaps little, perhaps more than you thought.

You often notice the difference only afterwards: on a morning when the old argument is not the first thing that comes to mind.