We often close ourselves off when unfortunate events happen in our lives.We try to forget the pain by pretending it doesn't exist，but although we can try all this we want，in the end，we can't hide from ourselves.【小题1】 Here are some ways you can open your heart more fully.

Breathe into pain

Whenever a painful situation arises，try to accept it instead of running away.【小题2】 By using our breath we soften our experiences.

Embrace the uncomfortable

【小题3】 We know how fear feels in our bodies：the tension in our necks，the tightness in our stomachs，etc.We can face these feelings of discomfort and let them show us where we need to go.

Spend time alone

For most of our lives we're surrounded by people：our friends，colleagues，peers，family members，loved ones，and strangers.How often do we really spend time alone? 【小题4】 You can truly open yourself and explore whatever you'd like.The golden ticket here is not to let yourself become distracted；just see what it's like to be alone.

Get outside of yourself

This may seem a little contradictory to the last tip.【小题5】 After you've explored the depths of yourself，you come away with a new understanding.Now，it's time to share that—not through telling others，but through being with others.

Just a few years out of law school, I decided that I wanted to write fictions. The only thing I had ever published before was a law-review article. I had made great efforts to write when I came home at night after work, but I was too tired. I decided to quit my job.

I began my new life on a February morning. I sat down at my kitchen table at 7:30 am and made a resolution. Every day I would write until lunchtime. Then I would lie down on the floor for 20 minutes to rest my mind. After that, I would return to work for a few more hours.

In my first year, I sold two stories. Then I wrote a novel, but I thought it wasn’t good enough, so I ended up putting it in a drawer. My second novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, was published to glowing reviews and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

My success sounds like a familiar story, but actually it was far from sudden. I quit my job, and for every story I published in those years, I had at least 30 rejections. The novel that I put away in the drawer took my four years. My breakthrough came in 2006, 18 years after I first sat down to write at my kitchen table.

Sometimes genius (天才) is just the thing that comes out after 20 years of working at your kitchen. Also, doing something truly creative requires the energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, Citizen Kan, at 25. T. S. Eliot wrote The Love Song of J. Afred Prufrock at 23.

It’s bad, but its not all bad. During the lockdown, to be confined in your home with the people you love most against an invisible disease may be, at times, uncomfortable. But it can also be like living inside a poem.

For me, especially early in the pandemic, it was also more than a little like living in a war zone again. The danger is real but also in some ways random. You assess risk constantly. In the first days of New York’s lockdown, at the market closest to my house, the handle of the shopping cart stared up at me. It was a bluish-purple strand of plastic that seemed to hold death. I had left the house without wipes. My son was climbing on everything.

People said it felt like living in a horror movie. That was not the sensation. A horror movie moves between fear and the delighted anticipation of fear. The feeling in the market was the leaden tug of dread. It was steady, and pressed you down, the way a survivor of a bombing says a blast wave does.

It was also a kind of gift. Against this backdrop, what you value in life is more vivid. You can’t call it a silver lining, but there is a quality of light involved, a lining that lights up edges. As a friend said after receiving a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, “A mirror doesn’t work without backing. You need the black.”

That is the value in these days.

Ordinarily, to experience what much of the country was experiencing in kitchens and family rooms, you would have had to get yourself to join the army. I once was a war correspondent and ran a news center for a while in a war zone. The danger was real but also in some ways random. We assessed risk constantly. And it was understood that any one of us would die for the other: “The truth of war,” David Finkel wrote in Thank You For Your Service, “is that it’s always about loving the guy next to you.”

And if you’re already in love with that person? Think of a man in bed, his family asleep down the hall as he dreams of faraway places. I was in faraway places, dreaming of a family asleep down the hall.

After we left the market I kept telling my son not to touch his face. So of course he reached for his cheek. Then he walked down a sidewalk that was all but empty. Knowing what’s important, people were staying home.