Six Questions About Something I Did Every Day Until I Quietly Stopped

When did I stop that?

Sunday, nine in the morning, I was clearing out the dish cupboard and found the green thermos flask tucked in a corner. A thin layer of dust on the lid. I opened it, and the smell of dried ginger was still inside, faint, like the smell of a room somebody has moved out of.

For a while I made a flask of ginger tea every morning before leaving the house. Ginger sliced thin, a little honey, poured into the flask, lid screwed on, into the bag. I tried to remember which day was the last. I could not. No argument, no decision, no day to remember. Just one morning I was running late and skipped it, and the next morning the same.

This is six questions for writing about a small thing like that, something that sat in your day and dropped away without notice, even from you.

It is not a piece for blaming yourself with "why do I give up so easily", nor for resolving to pick the old habit back up. Nobody's discipline is being graded here. A small thing that vanishes without a sound is also a kind of impermanence, and it deserves one look, the way you would look at an acquaintance who has moved away.

Why do small things drop away without notice?

Tuesday, lunch break, Phượng sat across from me peeling a mandarin.

"I haven't seen your ginger tea flask lately."

"No. It stopped, I don't know when."

"It used to make the whole office smell nice."

"Did it? That much?"

"It did. I thought you were selling it."

I laughed, and once the laugh was over something in me settled a notch lower. Someone had remembered it more clearly than I had.

The easy explanation is that I am lazy, or lack discipline. It sounds familiar and sounds just like what people say to themselves. But if that were true I would have dropped everything, and I have kept plenty of other things going for years.

Digging further it looks different. A small habit usually belongs to a season of life rather than to you. Back then I had ten spare minutes in the morning, the house was nearer work, someone lived with me who got up at the same time, the kitchen was still tidy. When the season changes small things drop off with it, like leaves, and nobody stands in front of the tree announcing that the season is over. What is worth looking at is not why it dropped, but what it did for me during that season.

Knowing you did it right is not about writing well. It is that there is at least one detail on the page that you had forgotten the day before, like the smell of ginger or the colour of the flask.

The first time, some people feel awkward, as if writing a letter to something that cannot read. Some feel lighter, some feel a sudden pang of missing. After about a week, some find they remember more small things that have dropped away, and some find everything exactly as before. Both are normal. On a busy day, answer only the first question and the fifth, just those two.

One easy slip is turning the paper into a project plan: "Things to pick back up: ginger tea, evening walk, journal". It sounds like direction, so it is tempting. But it turns looking back into a to-do list, and I have seen how short-lived that list is. Instead, when you finish, fold the page, wait three days, and only then ask whether you want to begin again. The answer then is usually truer.

Six questions, from light to deep

Pick up a pen, or open a blank note. Nobody reads this but you.

What was it, and how did it look, sound, smell and feel?

A hint: start with the object. The flask, the sandals, the notebook. Describe it as if for someone who has never seen it.

What time of day did it sit in, and next to which other task?

A hint: habits rarely stand alone, they usually cling to another task. I made the tea straight after brushing my teeth.

Which season of your life had it in it?

A hint: which house, which route to work, who lived with you. You do not need the exact year, only the exact feeling.

When it dropped away, did you notice? What moved into its place?

A hint: sometimes the gap is filled by the phone, sometimes by ten more minutes of sleep. Neither is wrong.

What did it give you that you never thanked it for?

A hint: it does not need to be a big benefit. It might be only a stretch of quiet, a smell, the feeling of starting the day with something done for yourself.

If you miss it today without starting again, how do you miss it?

A hint: allow it to be finished. Write a goodbye, or one sentence you want to keep.

That night, ten o'clock, I sat at the dining table with a ballpoint pen almost out of ink, writing in heavy lines and faint ones. I stayed longest on the third question. I realised that season was the one when my brother lived at home, and the two of us left for work at the same time. The tea flask belonged to a morning with two people going out the door together. I put the pen down and thought: oh, I never stopped making ginger tea. I stopped a morning.

The next morning I tried the fifth question. It was harder than I expected, because saying "thank you" to a flask of tea sounds a bit silly. I wrote: thank you for giving me ten minutes alone in the kitchen at half past six, when nobody needed anything from me yet. When I finished I sat looking at that line for a good while, the electric kettle bubbling beside me. It turned out what I missed was not the ginger tea. It was those ten minutes.

I am not drawing anything more from it. I only note it so you know an answer can drift away from its question, and that is fine. The question is the door, not the destination.

One place this goes wrong: answering to sound good. The questions sound deep so it is easy to want to write deeply, to turn it into a lovely paragraph. It is tempting because a blank page makes everyone want to write what they think is right. But a three-word answer that is true is better than ten lines put on display. Instead, write the first sentence that comes to mind, however ugly, and move on.

If you try it and it does not work

There are two common reasons.

The first: you sit for fifteen minutes and remember nothing, the page stays blank. This happens often, because the smaller the thing, the less trace it leaves. Do not force it. Try going through the object, look around the house for anything that belonged to it, or ask someone who lived through that season with you. A casual question will do, like the one Phượng asked me. The piece on why the old class group chat went quiet talks about the same kind of silent slipping away somewhere else.

The second: you write it down and feel more regret than expected, and the feeling stays. A thing done every day is sometimes tied to a person, or to a house that is no longer there. If so, stop, no need to finish another question, and not starting again or not remembering yet is fine. If sadness or an empty feeling lasts for several weeks, or affects eating and sleeping, that is the time to speak to someone with professional training. A sheet of paper is not the place to carry that alone.

If you want something lighter to try, three lines of gratitude each evening is a short practice that can fill the gap without needing to remember anything.

That Sunday afternoon I washed the thermos flask and set it out on the porch to dry.

I did not make anything in it.

It just sat there, draining, in the sun.