You can’t be like him. He calls you from his car on his way to work, asking how you are, joking about his pregnant wife. He invites you to dinner on Saturday. Then you can see how they’ve furnished the house. He’s inviting other family members too. Then you can see them at the same time. You can’t be like him. But you can take him up on the invitation, you can tell a joke too, and that’s exactly what you do. And because lately the panicked sense of losing control of your life has given way more and more to a surprising equanimity, you’re getting better and better at it: accepting invitations, laughingly acting like you’re laughing. What’s more, this kind of behavior reinforces the feeling that life is a so-called gift—and why be scared of losing control of something that might just as well not have existed?