A hard experience can put a whole place out of use. You stop walking down that street. You stop opening that cupboard. You keep away from a song, a smell, a room, sometimes for years. Nothing about the street changed. Your brain filed the pain under it, and the file opens every time you go near. That filing is fast, it is automatic, and nobody asks your permission for it.
This theme runs the same machinery backwards. If an ordinary object can be taught to carry fear, an ordinary object can be taught to carry a good day. The same mechanism works in both directions. What decides which way it points is what you keep putting next to it.
So we are not going looking for new places. Novelty is not the point here. The point is the kitchen table, the bus stop, the shelf by the door, the things you walk past every day without seeing. They do not have to give you a good day today. They only have to remind you of one. A cup can hand back an afternoon from two years ago. A doorway can hand back the person who stood in it once and did something kind for you.
Sometimes the thing you pick up brings back nothing good. Use it anyway, as a marker. Look at the shirt and ask where you were when you bought it, and where you are now. If the answer is that you were struggling then and you are not struggling now, you have just measured the distance you covered. That is worth writing down. Most of us never measure that distance, and so we never get to feel it.
When the memory is a good one, the work is detail. Do not write that the trip was lovely. Write who was there, what the light was doing, what you ate, what somebody said that made everyone laugh. I have been running this on one trip of my own for years. The same date comes round, I sit down, and I write that trip out again. Years later it has not faded the way the rest of that period faded. The parts you write out again are the parts you keep. The ones you never go back to fade, and you do not notice them fading.
Then there is the drawer. We buy things so that they will hold a memory for us, and then we put them somewhere and never look at them again. The ticket, the photograph, the letter, the small thing carried home from a trip. Give it twenty minutes. Open the drawer you have not opened in two years and see what is in there. Novelty does not always arrive from outside. Some of it has been in your house the whole time, waiting.
A simple way to start: pick one object or one place today, and write the memory it holds in enough detail that a stranger could see it. Tomorrow, pick another one. The point is not to collect objects. The point is to end up living in a house where the ordinary things are on your side.