An ordinary route deserves care because ordinary journeys make up most of living.

Attention and money tend to go to the exceptional trip and skip the daily one, though the daily one holds nearly all the hours. A commute repeated five hundred times is a bigger share of a life than any fortnight away, and it is usually the part nobody has bothered to make bearable. Ordinariness is not a reason to care less. It is the strongest argument for caring more.

Improve the thing you repeat rather than the thing you look forward to. A better bag, a different street, a seat on the other side of the carriage. Small changes to repeated hours add up in a way rare pleasures cannot.