Count double the thoughts that precede your actions, half the ones that follow.

From Alfred’s journal

Switch spent most of the afternoon on the low branch going over the jump he missed on Tuesday, which he has now missed about forty times by my count, thirty nine of them in his head. He wanted to know if I thought the branch had been wet. I said I had not been watching, which was true, and he told me the whole thing again anyway. For years I did the same with a poem I abandoned in another life, turning it over long after the paper was gone, and I called that diligence. Count double the thoughts that precede your actions, half the ones that follow. The odd part is that he did not look at the branch once all afternoon, only at the place in the air where he fell.