The Atlantic You’ll be happier if you grade reality on a curve. So there I was, staring at my mug of tea. It was 1993. I was sitting over a plate of eggs in the New Piccadilly Café in Soho, London. Things were not going well. As a man, as a person, as a unit of society, I was barely functioning. More acutely, I was having panic attacks, in an era when people didn’t yet say “panic attack.” They just said Oh, dear. As far as I was concerned, I was going insane. I took a despairing slurp from my mug, then put it back down. As I did so, the side of my hand touched the Formica tabletop, and I felt the radiant heat from where the mug had been resting a second before. Or, more accurately, I registered it. Through my private cerebral drizzle—the continuous, joy-canceling brain-rain that was my mental reality at the time—I noted it: energy, life, jiggling molecules, the world. A message from the fire of generosity at the heart of the universe. And the message was this: