The Canadian writer David Cain understood all this with a jolt in the summer of 2018 when he attended an event in the Greektown district of Toronto. The evening itself passed off unremarkably: “I was early,” he recalled, “so I spent some time in a nearby park, then checked out the shops and restaurants on Danforth Avenue. I stopped in front of a church to tie my shoe. I remember being nervous about meeting a bunch of new people.” Then, two weeks later, on the same stretch of street, a deranged man shot fourteen people, killing two of them, then killing himself. Rationally speaking, Cain concedes, this wasn’t a narrow escape on his part; thousands of people walk down Danforth Avenue every day, and it wasn’t as if he’d missed the shooting by only a few minutes. Even so, the sense that it could have been him caught in that gunfire was sufficiently powerful to bring into focus what it meant that it hadn’t been him. “When I watched videos of eye-witness accounts, including some in front of the church where I tied my shoes and the corner where I nervously loitered,” he wrote later, “it gave me a vital bit of perspective: I happen to be alive, and there’s no cosmic law entitling me to that status. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.”

This kind of perspective shift, I’ve found, has an especially striking effect on the experience of everyday annoyances—on my response to traffic jams and airport security lines, babies who won’t sleep past 5:00 a.m., and dishwashers that I apparently must unload again tonight, even though (I think you’ll find!) I did so yesterday. I’m embarrassed to admit what an outsize negative effect such minor frustrations have had on my happiness over the years. Fairly often, they still do; but the effect was worst at the height of my productivity geekhood, because when you’re trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s foisted upon you against your will, with no regard for the schedule you’ve painstakingly drawn up in your overpriced notebook. But when you turn your attention instead to the fact that you’re in a position to have an irritating experience in the first place, matters are liable to look very different indeed. All at once, it can seem amazing to be there at all, having any experience, in a way that’s overwhelmingly more important than the fact that the experience happens to be an annoying one. Geoff Lye, a British environmental consultant, once told me that after the sudden and premature death of his friend and colleague David Watson, he would find himself stuck in traffic, not clenching his fists in agitation, as per usual, but wondering: “What would David have given to be caught in this traffic jam?” It was the same for queues in supermarkets and customer service lines that kept him on hold too long. Lye’s focus was no longer exclusively on what he was doing in such moments or what he’d rather be doing instead; now, he noticed also that he was doing it, with an upwelling of gratitude that took him by surprise.