I once read a book called “Smiling at Fear” by Chogyam Trumpa. I don’t remember a word of it. But the title somehow remained in my memory banks, as it spoke to my own experience many years ago of meeting the existential abyss of emptiness — the annihilation of a core sense of self as a separate “me” — with curiosity and gentleness. From that moment on, fear never had the same hold on me as it had throughout all of my life.