Hearing a patient say “today was a good day” when it barely looked like one rewrites what a good day means.

Standards for a good day are set by what is available, not by a fixed scale, and people living with much less available revise theirs honestly rather than bravely. Hearing that said out loud resets your own measure. Most of us grade a day against an imagined better one and come up short every time. There is another way to count, and it is not pretending.

Try scoring today against what was actually possible in it. Ask what made it a good one even if the list is short: one decent conversation, one thing finished, less pain than yesterday. That question is quietly more useful than raising your standards.