Three Good Things

Three Good Things is a daily practice of deliberately recalling positive experiences, presented as a way to train attention and memory rather than as a demand to feel happy on command. Windy teaches it to Helen during the wilderness course, where it becomes a recurring measure of Helen’s changing relationship to hardship: at first she struggles to remember ordinary pleasures, while later she can name them readily, even on days shadowed by grief. The practice’s most revealing limit arrives when Jake leaves without coming back for her; Helen tries to use it, but cannot find a single good thing to record.

Definition and Rationale

Windy explains that people who are unhappy may remember the bad things from a day not because they consciously reject the good, but because they have not retained those experiences. She describes this as a matter of brain wiring, while emphasizing that the wiring can be altered through practice. Repeatedly registering good moments, she says, makes a person more likely to think about and remember them. Since the remembered past is what remains available to shape a life’s story, the exercise can change that story by changing what is recalled.

The method is specific and modest: each night, write down three good things that happened that day. Windy does not define a good thing as a major achievement or stroke of luck. A pleasant moment or a gentle breeze can qualify. The conversation resists the notion that the exercise instantly produces happiness; Windy describes its effect more tentatively, then asks Helen to try naming three things. The practice rests instead on a repeated act of noticing, with memory itself as its object of attention.

The book’s acknowledgments identify a source for this idea: Windy’s understanding of happiness, including the daily Three Good Things practice, was informed by Richard O’Connor’s nonfiction book Happy at Last: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Finding Joy. Within the story, the exercise is not simply advice delivered once and set aside. Its recurrence lets the reader see Helen test it across changing circumstances, from an awkward first attempt to moments when she can inventory a complicated day in detail.

Helen’s First Attempts and Growing Attention

When Windy asks for three good things, Helen initially says she does not think she can name them. She assumes that positive experiences would stand out if they had happened, while Windy suggests that the problem may be failing to remember them. After a long pause, Helen’s first answer is that she was glad Windy had come back to hike with her. Windy counts this as the first good thing. Helen then adds that the oatmeal that morning was slightly less rubbery than the previous day’s. The smallness of the examples is central to the practice: neither requires Helen to deny dissatisfaction or manufacture a triumph.

The exercise also shapes how Helen responds to a separate source of irritation. She realizes that every other person has a nickname, while she is called Helen—or sometimes Ellen, a mistake for her actual name. The omission makes her feel unrecognized and prompts the fear that nobody would notice if she disappeared. Across three uneventful hiking days, she could have rehearsed that grievance at every step. Instead, remembering Windy’s lesson that “The things you think about determine the things you think about,” Helen chooses to redirect her attention toward what the wilderness offers. She notices a hidden waterfall, elk scat by a stream, a salmon leaping from a creek, a sunset with eight colors, and the point at which her face becomes so dirty that it no longer feels dirty. Her choice does not make the wilderness perfect or erase her hurt; it accompanies a growing, if uneven, sense of being at home there.

During the hike to help Hugh, the method becomes a way to take stock of a day that was frightening as well as consequential. Helen recalls using her limited first-aid training to help him, applying her three-dimensional map-reading skills, and reaching a landmark understanding of her relationship with her brother and of her life more broadly. Those good things sit alongside vivid bad ones: being stuck listening to gossip, seeing Hugh’s foot collapse into a log, panicking over how to help, feeling that the outcome depended on her, and realizing the group was on the wrong trail. The exercise does not require her to substitute a positive account for an unpleasant one. It enables her to acknowledge both, including the satisfaction of solving the trail problem.

From Listing Pleasures to Reframing a Life

On another day, Helen can name far more than the required three. She recalls waking under a blue tarp beside a running creek, making good coffee, having a free morning, resting and sunning herself on a hot rock, feeling breezes, standing among wildflowers, seeing a heart-shaped cloud, and helping Beckett remove a splinter. She also includes a glimpse of heaven and a closeness to the person she has missed most in the world, which she had not felt for years. The long inventory shows how the exercise has become easier, but its emotional range matters as much as its length: ordinary sensory pleasures share the list with a profound experience of connection. Helen can call the day remarkable while admitting that she is miserable in that moment.

Her reflections connect appreciation with a change in what she wants from the course. Helen had hoped to become so tough that nothing could touch her, but now finds herself experiencing emotion intensely rather than remaining numb. She considers whether heartbreak focused on Jake may be easier to survive than the heartbreak connected to Mike, her former husband, without claiming certainty that it will be. Windy’s counsel that having does not make a person happy but appreciating does gives Helen a possible way to live with not having what she wants. The practice therefore works alongside, rather than cancels, longing: it helps her recognize what is present while she continues to feel the absence of what she desires.

Failure, Recovery, and Retrospective Meaning

The exercise reaches its sharpest failure when Jake is carried away after the celebration. Helen remains outside for several minutes, looking around in the hope that he will return. Once it becomes too painful to keep waiting, she walks back up the steps and tries to think of three good things, but cannot come up with even one. The contrast with her earlier abundant lists makes the silence consequential. The practice has not made her invulnerable to heartbreak; at this moment, loss overwhelms her ability to redirect attention.

The next morning, however, Helen frames her departure from the course through the Certificate she expects to carry home as proof that she was not defeated. She wills herself to recover after a tidal wave of longing for Jake and recognizes that surviving and getting back up are themselves meaningful. Later, when Grandma GiGi asks for the good things as Helen recounts both the good and the bad, the answer comes easily: Helen saw beauty she had never imagined, faced impossible challenges and survived, let people surprise her, lived through a snowstorm, made a real friend, and revised the framework of her life. She adds that she saw Nathan. The list no longer depends on small comforts alone; it can hold discoveries, endurance, relationships, and a memory of someone important.

After speaking with Grandma GiGi about love and the possibility of learning to accept it, Helen says she needs to get through the bar mitzvah, go home, see her dog, pick herself up, and begin a new-and-improved life. The plan feels bleak to her, so she adds that perhaps she will take dancing lessons. This is not a declaration that grief has ended. It shows the practice’s larger function in the story: Helen can name losses and still begin to notice possible next steps. In the acknowledgments, the exercise’s real-world reading source is made explicit; in Helen’s plot, its repeated use gives shape to a gradual shift from overlooking good experiences to making room for them in the account of her life.