I am surrounded by abundance.

Nobody sees goldfinches until somebody points one out. After that they are in the garden constantly, and they always were.

What changed was the search image you were carrying about with you.

Attention behaves like that with nearly everything, including what is going well. A week can hold a good conversation, a meal someone cooked for you, a problem that solved itself — and if the search image is set to what is missing, none of it registers as anything.

This is not about pretending the shortages are imaginary. Some of them are real and they matter. It is that the other column exists too, and it only gets counted if somebody counts it.