There is a chapter in G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy called "The Ethics of Elfland" where he asks why a child, shown some delightful thing once, immediately demands to see it again — and then again, and again, until the adult performing the trick nearly collapses from exhaustion. His answer overturns the usual assumption that repetition wears delight thin. A child asks for the same thing a hundredth time not because attention has run dry but because it has not.
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
From this small scene Chesterton draws a startling picture. Perhaps the sunrise is not a tired mechanical law grinding on, but something closer to an encore — the sun coming up each morning because it has been asked, once more, to do the same astonishing thing. "It is possible," he writes, "that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon." The point is less theology than posture. What looks like dull sameness to a jaded eye is, to a grateful one, a gift renewed on schedule. Elsewhere in the same book he sharpens the warning: the world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder. The shortage is never in the supply of marvels. It is in the faculty that receives them.
That faculty can be trained, which is where the Dhammapada extends the thought. Its chapter on happiness describes a mind that has learned to draw nourishment from what is already present rather than from what it lacks: "Feeders on joy we shall be, like the radiant gods." The line treats joy not as a lucky mood that drifts in on its own but as something a person feeds on deliberately, the way a body feeds on bread. The early Buddhist tradition names this cultivated gladness and returns to it as practice, taking joy in good fortune until the taking becomes the mind's resting temperature rather than an occasional break in the weather. Chesterton and the Dhammapada arrive at the same quiet claim from opposite directions: wonder and gratitude are not things that happen to a person. They are things a person does.
Which turns an ordinary morning into a small test. The light through the window has arrived once more, unearned and on time — the same encore it has performed every day of a life. Whether that registers as nothing at all or as something worth catching a breath over is not settled by the light. It is settled by the one standing at the window.