I choose to be happy.

There are two ways home from the station. One is eight minutes along the main road. The other adds four minutes and goes past the allotments, where somebody has been growing dahlias badly for three years.

Choosing does not reach as far as the feeling. You cannot instruct your chest to settle, and the days you try hardest are often the days it refuses most flatly. What choosing reaches is smaller and more practical: which way home, who gets called, whether the evening contains anything you actually like.

The feeling tends to arrive later, sideways, and not because it was ordered to.