Everyone you love has been lent to you for a while. Spend dinner like you know that.

Nobody in your life is permanent, which is a hard sentence rather than a poetic one. It is also the reason ordinary evenings are worth more than they look. Most of the time you move through the house as though everyone is a fixture, because thinking otherwise all day would be unbearable, and the quiet cost of that is a lot of half-present dinners.

You do not have to carry this heavily. Put the phone face down at one meal this week and ask somebody a question you have never asked them.