Three letters, written on the fifth floor of a building in Belo Horizonte, for a reader somewhere in the United States.
They come from a psychology and psychoanalysis practice, but they are not therapy and they are not advice. Each one takes a habit of the mind that nearly everyone recognises and writes about it the way you would write to a friend who had asked: plainly, with what is known, and with one small thing to try if you felt like trying it.
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Letter the first
A Letter on Where Attention Goes
Why the mind drifting is not the problem, and why the only part of attention you can actually practise is the return.
Read the first letter -
Letter the second
A Letter on the Dark and the Thoughts It Enlarges
Why a worry at one in the morning is seen through night glass, and the small habit of leaving it at the door until daylight.
Read the second letter -
Letter the third
A Letter on Hurry, and What It Costs
The difference between speed, which the work sometimes asks for, and hurry, which nobody can actually require of you.
Read the third letter
A word before you read
The letters are reading. Nobody becomes a patient by opening one, no result is promised, and nothing is sold. Who writes them, and why in English, is on its own page; the small print covers your data and the conditions of reading. If something here presses on you, take it to someone qualified near where you live, in person.