You’re walking down a sleepy suburban sidewalk, one where rusty mailboxes adorn picket-fenced lawns and weeds poke up through the cracks. The street plans are straight rectangles—straight enough that you can see a person rounding the next corner and heading your way. She sees you too. Your pace and hers considered, you have twenty long seconds before you pass her.

The street is empty enough that she is the only thing of interest in your vision for the next twenty seconds, and you are the only thing of interest in hers. Both of you know this.

You could continue walking straight ahead, your gaze fixed forward as you normally do, and share the next twenty seconds with her in anticipation of the Passing. Are there any less awkward things you can do?

You could just keep your head down and pretend to be very interested in residential shrubberies and patterns in the occasional cracks in the ground for the next twenty seconds.

Could you break out into a jog, the way you do when you need to pass slow people ahead of you, pretending that you’re actually on a leg workout, and thereby shave a few seconds off the awkward anticipation? Not too credible—you’re not really dressed for that.

You could pretend to be listening to music. You don’t have your earbuds in your ears right now, but twenty seconds is enough time to fish them out of your purse and stuff them in your ears and make song-selecting finger motions on your phone screen (which you’ll also have to fish out of your purse). The thing is, you have to play it off like that’s something you were going to do anyway, and not just something you did in response to her appearing, to stave off the awkward anticipation of the Passing. Be very casual.

Or you could just pretend to be reading your phone. You’ll still have to fish your phone out of your purse for this, but once the phone is out you have an excuse not to pay attention to your interloper for the next fifteen seconds. You could also pretend to be dashing off texts to your friends. Come to think of it, you could be actually dashing off texts to your friends.

Okay, five seconds until the Passing. Do you nod to your interloper? Smile? Say hi? Wave? Or do you act entirely unaware of her existence? Except, of course, to avoid colliding with her.

What protocol do you follow if the encounter becomes a dreaded Sidewalk Tango? If she and you both adjust in order to avoid a collision, but you adjust in the same direction? And suddenly you’re both mirroring each other’s moves in a terpsichorean game of Chicken, until one of you finally has the nerves to say, “No, you go left—” or “Your left, my right” or “How about we each step to our respective lefts—”

Oh! You’re past her now. You said nothing to her and she said nothing to you. Awkwardness averted!