How can you take life in stride when every bother bothers you?

From Alfred’s journal

A man came out to the bus shelter on Linden with his coffee and found the bench wet, and he stood there with his mouth tight about it for the whole eleven minutes. The wind took a napkin out of his hand. A kid's bike bell went off twice behind him. By the time the bus came he had been stung four separate times by nothing at all, and he climbed on looking like a man who had lost something. I used to think a calm temper was a thing you were handed at birth, the way I was handed these feet. But how can you take life in stride when every bother bothers you? There was a sparrow on the wire above him the whole while, getting rained on, saying nothing.