The Man Who Wanted to Be Happy

by Laurent Gounelle

  “You can’t be sure, of course, but it was perhaps a message from your body that you were acting in conflict with your values of respect for others, trust, and honesty.”

  “It’s true they are fundamental values for me.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You were saying also that you must give of your best in what you are doing?”

  “Yes, it’s one of the keys to happiness. You know, human beings delight in sloppiness, but bloom when making demands on themselves. It’s really by being focused on what we are doing to succeed in applying our skills and abilities, and by taking up new challenges each time, that we feel happy. It’s true for everyone, whatever the job or skill level, and our happiness is increased if our work brings something to others, even indirectly, even modestly.”

  At that precise moment, my memory took me back four years. I was in Morocco, in Marrakesh. I was strolling around Djemaa el-Fna square at the end of the day. Night plunged the square into an enchanting atmosphere. Charcoal fires with meat grilling on them were crackling at the numerous restaurants. The flames cast their glow on the crowd of passersby, fleetingly lighting up faces and making huge dancing shadows. The smell of grilled merguez competed with the smell of steaming couscous. Street peddlers were everywhere. Some offered leather goods barely out of the nearby tanneries, which still had an acidic, aggressive smell. Others displayed great big engraved brass trays that reflected the light from the fires, making golden flashes spring from faces, turbans, and djellabas. The noise of voices mixed with the throbbing sounds of drums and the melodies of the snake charmers’ flutes. I was walking, eyes wide, enchanted by the incredible atmosphere, my senses saturated with perfumes, images, and sounds, when I was stopped by a little man of about 50, slim, all smiles, his face furrowed by the southern sun. He sat on a box placed directly on the beaten earth, with a steaming restaurant on one side of him and a pottery dealer on the other. I smiled back and looked at the chair he was pointing to for me to sit down. That’s when I understood his trade. Shoe shiner. My smile froze, and I stiffened imperceptibly. I had never felt at ease with trades that required those practicing them to perform thankless tasks. Shoe shiner was perhaps the one I accepted with the greatest difficulty, because the worker operates in the presence of his customer, in front of him, on him. Even the respective postures embarrassed me: the customer sat on a high chair, dominating the situation; the shoe shiner below, squatting, seated, or kneeling. I had never gotten used this kind of service.

  The man renewed his invitation and gently insisted, still giving me his beaming smile. As a Westerner, I represented, no doubt, the ideal customer. But precisely my position as a foreigner accentuated my unease: I didn’t want to give his compatriots the sight of a Westerner having his shoes cleaned by one of them. A nasty colonialist cliché. I don’t know if he saw my unease or interpreted it as hesitation. Perhaps simply my absence of indifference to his proposition gave him the hope of convincing me. He got up, still smiling, and came over to me. I didn’t have time to express a refusal: he was already upon me, examining my shabby shoes while formulating his diagnosis and the promise to rejuvenate them.

  No doubt my problem with turning down other people’s requests explains how I came to be, in spite of myself, sitting in the chair I was looking at a moment before with repugnance. I didn’t dare look at the people around me for fear of encountering accusing eyes. He was already busy with my shoes. Grabbing half a lemon, he was energetically rubbing the shabby leather with it. In the state I was in, I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything. I don’t think I would have been more surprised if he had rubbed a banana into my shoes. He applied himself enthusiastically. Sure of himself, he was in control of his movements, alternating the lemon and different types of brush. Afar, the snake charmer’s flute kept up its lament without stopping.

  I was beginning to unstiffen a little. We exchanged a few sentences, but he remained very focused on what he was doing, still displaying his ineffable smile. He applied a sort of blackish cream with an old rag, massaging the leather to work it in. Then he started to make it shine with a nimble little brush, and, as my shoes came back to life, his smile grew wider, revealing dazzling teeth whose whiteness contrasted with his brown skin. Once my shoes were as smooth and shiny as when they were new, his eyes shone with pride. I had completely forgotten my initial embarrassment. His joy was infectious, and I suddenly felt very close to this man who was a stranger 15 minutes before. I felt a real spurt of sympathy for him, like a wave of friendship.

  He named an honest price which I willingly handed over, and, in the heat of the moment, he insisted on offering me mint tea in a little metal cup, sharing his joy by prolonging the relationship. I suddenly became aware of something that then seemed obvious, painfully obvious: this man was happier than I, who had a respected profession and who, despite my modest means, was no doubt a thousand times richer than he was. This man radiated happiness through every pore of his body, and his happiness shone around him.

  Just remembering this scene, I had tears in my eyes.

  “Why did you talk of the usefulness of having challenges to meet so that we can feel happy by using our skills?” I asked.

  “Because a challenge stimulates our concentration, pushes us to give our best in what we do and draw real satisfaction from it afterward. It’s a precondition for blossoming in what we do.”

  “You said as well that a life is successful when you accomplish things in harmony with what you are. But how do you know if that’s the case?”

  “Imagine you are going to die tonight, and all this past week, you have known this would happen. What would you have done differently during your last week?”

  “Now, there’s a question!”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s say that this last week was a bit special, given our meeting. There is not much I would change.”

  “Right, take the week before your journey to Bali.”

  “Well … let’s say … er … let’s see …”

  In my mind I tried to rerun the film of the week in question. I tried hard to visualize hour by hour what I had done, and, for each of my actions, I asked myself if I would really have done it, knowing that I was going to die at the end of the week. It took me several minutes to reply: “Roughly, there are about thirty percent of my actions I would have kept.”

  “You’re telling me that you would have given up doing seventy percent of what you did, if you had known you were going to die?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “It’s too much, much too much. It’s normal to carry out certain meaningless tasks, but not to that extent. In fact, you ought to be able to reverse the proportion: be able to assert that, knowing you are about to die, you would continue to carry out seventy percent of what you normally do. It would be a sign that your actions are in harmony with who you are.”

  “I see.”

  “And you will observe that it doesn’t relate to the difficulty of the tasks, simply the meaning they have for you.”

  “Fine, I agree with all this in the absolute, but in practice it’s not always possible to do what you want to do.”

  “You always have the choice.”

  “No, if I only did what was in accord with myself, I would lose my job—”

  “So you have the choice of keeping or losing your job.”

  “But in that case, I would have to find another, perhaps less well paid. I might not be able to pay my rent anymore!”

  “Then you would have the choice of keeping that apartment or taking another, cheaper one, perhaps farther from your work.”

  “My family and friends would be disappointed if I moved away.”

  “So, you would have the choice of satisfying them or disappointing them.”

  “Looked at like that …?”

  “It’s just to say that the choice is yours. At certain moments in life, you don’t necessarily have a lot of choices, and they are painful perhaps, but they exist. In the end, you al
one decide how you live: you always have the choice, and it’s good to keep that in mind.”

  “I sometimes have the impression that it’s others who decide for me.”

  “Then you are choosing to let them decide for you.”

  “All the same, I think there are people who have more choices than others.”

  “The more you go through life, the more you get rid of the beliefs that limit you, the more choice you have. And choice is freedom.”

  I looked at the immense space in front of me, the dizzying space stopped by nothing, and I started dreaming of freedom. My eyes fixed on the horizon, deeply inhaling this intoxicating air, with its perfume of infinity.

  “You know,” he went on, “you can’t be happy if you see yourself as the victim of events or others’ desires. It is important to understand that it’s always you who decides, whatever it is. Even if you are the lowest of the low at work, you are the director of your life. You’re in command of the controls. You’re the master of your destiny.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you mustn’t be afraid: you will discover that it’s precisely when you allow yourself to choose actions that are in harmony with yourself, that respect your values and express your abilities, that you become precious to others. Doors open of their own accord. Everything becomes easier, and you no longer need to struggle to move forward.”

  We remained silent for a long while. Then he got up, and I broke the silence.

  “I phoned about my plane ticket. I can’t change it without paying an expensive surcharge. You had planned to tell me today if there were still important things left for me to discover that would make it necessary for us to meet tomorrow.”

  “I think there is one major apprenticeship left.”

  “And tomorrow you’re still not available in the morning?”

  “No.”

  “Forgive me insisting, but can you really not free yourself so I can make my afternoon flight?”

  “No.”

  I was really out of luck. I was faced with a tough choice: should I abandon the final one of these meetings which enthralled me and were awaking me to myself or pay a scandalously high price to put off my return?

  “What would you do in my place? Would you change flights?”

  “It’s for you to choose,” he said, a satisfied smile playing on his lips, his kindly gaze looking down into my questioning eyes.

  Infinity was reflected in his pupils.

  He walked away toward the campan, with his slow, serene gait, and I lost sight of him when he entered the thicket of bamboo.

  17

  SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS! It amounted almost to buying a second return ticket! Difficult to accept … It would weigh heavily on my bank account, increasing the spectacular overdraft it must be showing already. Relations with my bank manager would be affected for a while. Not to mention that taking the plane on Sunday would ensure that I’d arrive home tired, only a few hours before starting work again. Not a very enjoyable prospect. At the same time, it wasn’t every day that you had the chance to meet a man like Master Samtyang. But it made for an expensive session! Really, I didn’t know what to do anymore. Each option seemed painful, and I couldn’t decide.

  I was in the car and nearing Ubud. I had to decide now because, to change my ticket, I had to stop at the travel agency in Kuta before it closed. I was coming up to the place where I would have to choose my route.

  I tried to weigh the pros and cons. To no avail. There were wins and losses in both situations. An impossible choice! I wasn’t going to flip a coin, though; there wouldn’t exactly be anything illustrious about that: after five days of personal development, in all conscience I ought to be capable of reaching a decision!

  In the end, my conscience told me that I would get over a hectic start of term and that I would of course find a way of paying off my overdraft one day. In six months or a year, I would have forgotten this difficult moment. Whereas I could no doubt profit for a long time from what the healer was going to teach me, all my life perhaps. I arrived at the crossroads and headed south, toward Kuta. As Oscar Wilde said, “the only thing one never regrets are one’s mistakes”!

  I remembered what the president of Mexico said at a time when his country was running up colossal debts. A journalist asked him if he was losing sleep. He said an overdraft of a thousand dollars stopped you from sleeping at night, but, for an overdraft of a hundred billion dollars, it was your banker who lost sleep. I concluded that my debts were no doubt still very inadequate.

  It took me nearly an hour to reach Kuta. I didn’t like the place. For me, Kuta was not Bali. It was where the greatest concentration of tourists was, particularly Australian surfers. After dark, the town was transformed into a gigantic nightclub. It was impossible to walk a yard without being accosted by a Javanese offering you drugs or a prostitute. In the ’70s, Kuta was part of the hippies’ must-see circuit of the three K’s: Kuta, Kathmandu, Kabul. In 2002, Kuta, symbol of Western excess, was chosen by al-Qaida for one of its bloodiest bomb attacks.

  The journey took longer than expected, and I arrived at the end of the afternoon. The travel agency was closing its doors in ten minutes. I turned up the narrow one-way street at top speed, and by a miracle, I spotted a parking place just outside the office. I went past the space so I could back in—then noticed that the car behind hadn’t stopped, even though my intention to park was obvious. Not only had I put my signal on in advance, but I had also pulled over slightly to the side of the road to show I intended to park there. No, he had to follow me, preventing me from backing up. For a moment I stayed there, jutting out with my signal on, in order to get him to understand my maneuver, but it was no good.

  I lowered my window, put my head out, and asked him to reverse a bit so I could park. No other car was following him; it would have been easy. It was clear he understood me, especially as I was reinforcing my words with explicit gestures. To no avail. A Westerner, in his late 50s, he had a crimson face, a symptom common to fair-skinned people who have been in the sun too much and to alcoholics. In his case, I opted readily for the second explanation. He had the stubborn look of those who have no flexibility of mind and never want to let things drop. His posture gave off an incredible sense of inertia. He seemed as heavy as his car, rooted to the spot. I repeated my gestures and my words. Nothing. Obtuse face, rigid shoulders, fixed arms, big hands clenched on the wheel: his whole body expressed his desire not to give in. Because giving in was clearly the way he interpreted the action of backing up two yards. It seemed obvious to me: in his life, his relations with others must be governed by force, and no doubt he must believe that responding to someone’s request amounted to giving ground, to showing weakness. Yes, that was it! He must have a belief along the lines of “never let anyone get the better of you, never budge an inch.”

  In other circumstances, I would have found him funny, even if those around him probably didn’t think he was a barrel of laughs. But the travel agency was closing in five minutes. I had no choice; I had to get that place—there was no time to find another. Then I heard the sage’s words in my head: you always have a choice. Suddenly I said to myself that I could fight inertia with inertia. I switched off, put the hand brake on, and left the car in the middle of the road, blocking the street. I rushed into the travel agent’s office and held out my ticket to the employee, who had already started switching off the lights. The pattering of his computer keyboard was soon drowned out by a continuous car horn. I handed over my credit card, slightly anxious, praying that the transaction wouldn’t be refused. The operation took a little time, which seemed ominous, but, in the end, the system accepted the card—I had become a bit poorer.

  My wallet lighter, a new plane ticket in my pocket, I went back to my car. The driver was beside himself with rage. He kept his hand on the horn and only took it off to release a torrent of insults. I gave him my nicest smile, which only doubled his anger. I pulled away, and he followed so closely that I thought he was going to pu
sh me. It was really ridiculous. Then I understood fully the idea of choice talked about by the healer. What was striking about this driver was the absence of choice of behaviors dictated by his personality. He could neither reverse nor negotiate nor be patient. All he could do was force his way through. This man was not free. On the contrary, he was in the grip of his beliefs. It was obvious. A fortnight before, I would just have said, “What an idiot!” Today, I could see that intelligence probably had nothing to do with his extraordinary attitude.

  I was astonished at my new understanding of behaviors that I used to reject with, no doubt, a certain intolerance. Carried along by this new understanding and compassion, it made me want to observe and listen to people more, to try to discover the beliefs that were perhaps the origin of their attitudes.

  I went to the seafront and sat at a table on the terrace of a handsome café and ice cream parlor. I have always been in the habit of spending to console myself for my money troubles.

  I ordered a chocolate-avocado cocktail, a surprising but absolutely delicious mixture, and settled into the comfortable teak armchair facing the sea. The wind must have been blowing hard, because the waves were particularly high. The late-afternoon sun was flooding the shore with its warm orange light, so flattering to the houses, as well as people’s faces. The beach was emptying itself onto my café terrace, which was becoming gradually livelier. It was good to be alone without really being alone, to enjoy the growing ambiance without having to contribute to making it.

  At the next table, two young people were talking. She was delicate and pretty, with chestnut hair and blue eyes, a slightly sulky look; he was not very tall but fairly beefy, with a thick neck and dark brown hair cut short. She called him Dick. She was telling him about the shadow play she had been to the night before, which had visibly fascinated her. He was listening to her attentively, but it seemed clear to me that a few shadows, however artistically done, wouldn’t have been enough to move him. Perhaps, nonetheless, he was moved by the sensitivity she was voicing. I felt they were not a couple, but she had feelings for him she had not yet made obvious. He called her Doris, and I was unable to guess what he felt for her. Dick was one of those men so virile that you don’t know if emotions and feelings are part of their basic equipment. I amused myself imagining him as a caveman dragging his mate off by the hair to his bed.