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At a Japanese shrine you pay a hundred yen, shake a box, and pull out a paper with your fortune on it.
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If it is good, you fold it and put it in your wallet. If it is bad, you do not take it home at all. You fold it into a long strip and tie it to a rack of wires on the way out.
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It is a rule about where a thing gets kept, and your house has been the rack all year.
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You Are Not the Place This Is Supposed to Be Kept.
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Traditionally the bad ones went on a pine branch. The reason is a pun. The Japanese word for pine is matsu, and the Japanese word for wait is also matsu, written differently and said the same.
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So the waiting gets tied to the tree, and the tree does it instead of you.
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That is the whole mechanism. The bad fortune does not get destroyed, argued with, or explained away. It gets relocated to something standing outside that is not going home with you.
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Shrines have had to build racks for it. So many people leave so many of these that the trees could not take it, and the paper sits out in the weather until the priests clear it off.
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Nobody is expected to hold their own bad news in their own pocket.
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There is one more rule, and it is the strict one. You get one draw per visit, per question. Pulling again until you like the answer is treated as both rude and pointless.
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Anyone who has reread a text forty times looking for a better reading of it knows exactly what that rule is for.
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The practice moves over without much trouble. Here is the whole thing, and it takes four minutes:
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Write the one sentence you have been carrying, in your own hand, on one strip of paper. |
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Fold the strip the long way, twice, until it is a ribbon. |
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Pick the spot outside: the porch rail, the back fence, one branch in the yard. |
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Tie it there, in a knot you would have to work at to undo. |
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Walk back in without photographing it, and do not go check on it tomorrow. |
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It is not the paper doing the work. It is that the sentence is now outdoors, at a fixed address, in weather, and the address is not you.
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It is not forgetting. It is not forgiving. It is filing, and the file drawer is outside the house for once.
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If he surfaces this week, and October is the month for it, the sentence is already written and already outside. You will not have to compose it at eleven at night with the phone in your hand.
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You have been the tree and the rack and the weather all year, and none of those three jobs was ever yours.
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Also True
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What They Found
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Behavior researchers have a name for what happens next. When a reward that used to come sometimes stops coming entirely, the behavior does not fade on a smooth line. It spikes first. The animal presses the lever harder, faster, more times than it ever did while the lever was working. They call it an extinction burst, and it is the reason the urge gets worse in the first week after you stop reaching, not better. It is also why he tends to surface the same week you go still.
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The Mirror
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What is the one sentence you would write on the strip tonight, if nobody was ever going to read it?
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Today’s Devotion: Tonight, write that one sentence on a strip of paper and fold it the long way. Tie it to the porch rail or a branch in the yard before you go to bed, and leave it out there through the weekend.
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Keep your power in your own hands.
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Sofia
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