Osama Bin Laden has spoken after a year of public silence, arousing rage, contempt, and worry among the American public. It’s the worry I’m interested in. Worry isn’t good for anyone; plus, you never know if you are worried about precisely the right thing, which causes you to worry even more pervasively.

It’s hard to apply the sunny New Agey message that there’s a lesson to everything, that if you wait long enough through a trying time you will finally see God’s grand design. What is the design here? What are we to learn? Bin Laden makes vague reference to a truce this time. A-ha. A shining light at the end of the tunnel? Perhaps he’s on the run. It takes us back to old childhood games where the neighbor kid finally says, okay I’ll give you some candy if you let me use your wagon. Just for a minute. I’ll bring it right back.

I sometimes sit on the subway, doing a variation of the Tonglen meditation where I breathe in all the world’s anxiety about terrorism and then breathe out a reality where that anxiety is gone. The collapse of the Trade Towers never happened; it was all a dream. I forget that my children have to get through the next nine decades. I open my eyes and try to stay present. I put my purse on my shoulder, walk out the parting doors and just live.