Thank your parents for the boring stuff: the rides, the lunches, the permission slips. That’s where the love was hiding.

Most love arrives disguised as logistics. The dramatic gestures are rare and easy to spot, while the real evidence is a decade of early alarms, packed lunches, forms signed at the door and somebody waiting in a car park in the rain. It goes unseen precisely because it is reliable, and reliable things stop registering. Nobody thanks a system that never breaks down.

Thank somebody for one dull specific thing this week. Not gratitude in general, but the drive to practice every Thursday for three years. Name the detail, because the detail is what proves you noticed.