When I focus on gratitude, happiness flows to me easily.

Some households rehearse the day's grievances over dinner — the traffic, the manager, the neighbour's bins — and everyone at the table becomes fluent in it. Other households ask what was good, and the children grow up able to answer without stalling.

Neither group is luckier. They have practised different sweeps of the same day, and the sweep decides what gets found.

The ease comes from the practice, not from the mood. Week one of asking what was good is awkward and produces thin answers. By week four, things start presenting themselves before you have gone looking.