I SUPPOSE MEETING BAD NEWS with a muffin recipe demonstrates either spectacular denial or spectacular piety. I have often been accused of both, but the former is the more likely culprit here; I awoke this morning thinking, “No more long walks with the wife; no more dancing at the rate of five pounds an hour, no more sitting comfortably through a movie that’s more than two hours long. My life has constricted to just about the size of the bedclothes, and it’s wash day.”

And yet — all that is true, and sad, and real, and yet — all my tubes are on the inside, along with all my organs (well, except for a gall bladder and one testes decomposing in a biohazard dump somewhere). I can drive (not far, but I can drive) and laugh and dance a little in one place with as much joy as when I frightened everyone else off the floor. We are but a pane of glass through which both sides — the apparently-now good and apparently-now bad — reflect and refract in innumerable combinations. Pick your frame and pick your life; expect the unexpected, and mind that you reframe as needed.

And don’t give up hope. “While life exists, the possibilities are endless,” as Nestor said right before the FX-laden armageddon in Battle Beyond the Stars. He may have been a character in a cheap movie when he said it — but from a certain perspective, aren’t we all?

Tags: arm's length, moments