If, at that same panic point, you say to yourself, All right, this is just where I am. How do I get the most out of this part? You're putting yourself in a very different place, a zone of possibilities and expansiveness.

There are things you can do to help yourself enter that zone. A meditation practice is one of them. "One thing meditation's shown me," says Sharon Salzberg, author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience and cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, "is that experience is one thing and our interpretation of it is another. The interpretation seems so solid and comes so quickly, we don't realize that there's space in there and that we have a choice of responses: compassion versus impatience, positive versus negative." To illustrate the difference between experience and interpretation, she laughingly gives the following example: "The other night, I was walking in the rain toward the class I teach, when I saw this guy coming toward me on a bicycle. My first thought was, Oh, this poor guy, out in the rain on a bike. Then he splashed me. My next thought was, Oh, how ridiculous to be out in the rain on a bike."

When you can separate incident from interpretation, she continues, you see more clearly, with more heart. "You learn to dare to say, What happens if I try viewing this event from this angle instead?" she says. "It becomes like an adventure. You say, Wow, I spent all those years catering to the needs of this other person. Look at this: I'm going to be myself. Or I'm going to write my book. Or I'm going to reach out to these other people." If you think happiness can lie in only one thing, she concludes, you miss all the available happiness.