You can name your dread but not your delight

The unpleasant parts of a week come with dates, while the good parts arrive unlabelled and leave no trace.

The asymmetry is easy to test on yourself. This week's irritations are already listed somewhere, either on a calendar or in the back of your mind where they hum. The week's likely enjoyments are not listed anywhere, because nobody puts the smell of rain on a diary. So one column is fully staffed and the other is empty, and the week begins looking worse than it will turn out to be. It is not pessimism exactly. It is a filing problem: only one type of thing gets written down, and things that are not written down are hard to remember in advance.

The fix is not to schedule enjoyment, which usually kills it. It is to notice that the empty column is empty because of how records are kept, not because the week is barren. If you think back over yesterday properly, minute by minute rather than in headlines, there will be four or five moments that were genuinely fine and were not registered as anything at the time. Yesterday was not exceptional. Today is holding a similar number, and so will tomorrow, and the supply is fairly steady across quite different sorts of days.

Something useful follows from this. When a week looks unpromising, the accurate response is not that it will be bad, but that the good parts have not been named yet and will not be until they happen. That is a smaller and more honest claim than optimism, and it survives contact with an actually difficult week. The dull Wednesday still contains the walk to the letterbox in surprisingly good weather. It was never going to appear on the list, and it counts anyway.