Kehoro sat at the window, watching the birds dart from bush to bush, snatching into their beaks the brilliant red berries from the newest and most flexible branches. The sun was still hours from reaching its peak, but already the window glass close to his face made his cheeks and his hair feel warm. A bird with a red-tipped head that muted to pink and then grey toward the base of its head flitted back and forth between a tree and a basket, filled with flowers, that hung from the eve of the house. Kehoro took in the red and blue and yellow flowers that surrounded each of the trees in the yard. They pleased his eyes and the odor of freshly mown grass filled his nostrils and made him smile. But then he remembered what he had been thinking about and his mood changed.
Kehoro was unhappy in a most fundamental way. He did not know what he wanted from life, but he was completely dissatisfied with what he had. He meditated about his dilemma from time to time, though not in the traditional sense. He considered what he disliked about his current, and lifelong, situation and then tried to determine how he could change, either himself or his environment, to remove the source of the unhappiness. But it was useless.
Kehoro sought out his realm of discontent. He didn't know it, of course, but he sought it out.
The nearest he came to defining what happiness might be to him was a moment in which he realized that he wanted simplicity. A simple house, a simple role to play, a simple diet, a simple exercise regimen, a small and close set of friends who shared his sense of right and wrong and his sense of happiness.
The trouble with this definition was that it involved sacrificing many of the things he had come to enjoy, things that he had come to appreciate having in his life: alcohol, casual sex, fine foods, and Cuban cigars, among other things. His inclusion of an exercise regimen in his definition of happiness also was out of place. Kehoro equated exercise with pain. Indeed, he equated many elements of the simple life as he defined it as being painful. He was an adamant opponent of pain.
Pain made him unhappy, a state of mind from which he was seeking escape, so the idea of engaging in things he would consider painful to achieve happiness seemed utterly at odds with logic. All of these thoughts came rushing in at almost the same moment he decided simplicity would bring...or at least facilitate...happiness.
Mind you, this moment at which he realized he wanted simplicity was the nearest he came to defining happiness for himself.
When he found himself unexpectedly enjoying a moment, he caught the sensation and prevented it from getting out of control. "It's great now," he thought to himself, "but it can't last. Even if it could, it would lose its luster and its appeal fast and I would no longer enjoy it. But it won't last that long...never does." Sure enough, Kehoro's momentary jubilation, if you could call it that, dissipated in the blink of an eye. The pleasing taste of a glass of nice red wine gave way to concerns of a hangover. A night pierced by erotic pleasures with an attractive woman brought the morning and an awkward goodbye. An evening with a multi-course meal at a five-star restaurant ended with thoughts of too many calories and shame for spending money on such a meal instead of contributing most of the amount spent on the dinner to a food bank. In an attempt to return to a mild sense of happiness and satisfaction after the fine meal gone bad with guilt, Kehoro would smoke a Cuban cigar smuggled to him by a Canadian colleague. That, too, was redirected toward guilt for complicity in smuggling and fear of throat cancer.
Kehoro looked at the birds with envy; they looked to him as if they were happy, content with their lives and undistracted from the simple task of finding food. His sense of pleasure was interrupted. He had forgotten, for just a moment, the most important part of his story: he was a seeker and his realm was discontent.
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