Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

Gratitude gets framed as a duty when it is closer to a form of alertness. Everything reliable becomes invisible, and the things most worth noticing are exactly the ones that have been steady long enough to disappear: the working knee, the person still there, the roof. Losing sight of them is less ingratitude than a kind of drowsiness.

Waking up from it takes deliberate looking rather than effortful feeling. Pick one ordinary thing today and consider what its absence would actually mean for your week. Not to make yourself feel lucky, only to see something that has stood in front of you unnoticed for years.