Watching the Dow Industrial Average has been like watching the heart monitor on a critically ill patient.

During the treatment, Kyle was connected to a heart monitor and constantly watched by Ambio's medical staff.

But this doesn't perhaps have to be the measure of everything. We don't need to be constantly offended by our agitations. Our day-to-day troubles don't have to be the yardstick by which we judge the value of our lives. Given where we've come from and how we're constituted, we were never going to be happy in any obvious way. But perhaps a good life can in the end be compatible with being fairly perturbed most days of the week. Perhaps it doesn't matter that a relationship has failed once more. Perhaps it isn't appalling that our business doesn't deliver us the returns we might have had in our old job. We've stretched ourselves, we've learned to raise our voices, we've developed courage. We don't have to see marks of grief and trouble as some kind of a violation of a pristine contract, but as the logical and immovable consequences of our stubborn and subtle natures interacting with the complexities of existence. We're sometimes frightened into reorienting our lives by being asked to contemplate how we might feel about them from the vantage point of our deathbeds. But if on this bed we were to look back at a rollercoaster of emotions and events, we might have got married for the fifth time recently, we might smile to ourselves and, to the beeping of the heart monitor beside us, say with wisdom and compassion, it wasn't a calm life for sure, it wasn't for the most part even a happy one, but heaven knows it was a truly and properly interesting one. And with this as our measure, we might meet our end with all the satisfaction and self-acceptance we could hope for.

(heart monitor beeping)

For seven days, I'll need to wear a small portable heart monitor and fill out a questionnaire on a modified iPod.