“The
beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful,
and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is
one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty
Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her
death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph
Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator
for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father
when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5.
In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his
delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw
four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own
body partially paralyzed.
In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher
position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was
guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
I’m not sure I knew
the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess
that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of
them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard
in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been
lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed
of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an
apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money
to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went
to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in
difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even
optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful
Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and
seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly
didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.
So — as post-1960s
cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year
in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all
of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of
the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really
more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But
today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto,
in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost
luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can
understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and
I can’t think of a single thing I lack.
I’m no Buddhist monk,
and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an
hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on
the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least,
happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it
seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to
peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding
happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry
about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure.
Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play
ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go
shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids
who are now out in the world).
When the phone does
ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in
my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the
United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I
haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse,
or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news
cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left
them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry
James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can
satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense
never did that for me.
Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.
I certainly wouldn’t
recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who
have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or
wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments
ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem
desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their
lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations
they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world,
I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which
meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and
always to remain dissatisfied.
Being self-employed
will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain
than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are
coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know,
I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through
a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in
Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with
nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that
night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more
abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the
new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a
Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent.
And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most
freely when it isn’t pursued.
If you’re the kind of
person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a
small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from
matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t
where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere
else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m
there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park
Avenue at all.
Pico Iyer’s most recent book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” is just out in paperback.
Rainy Kaye is an aspiring overlord. In the mean time, she blogs at Rainy of The Dark, and and writes paranormal novels from her lair somewhere in Phoenix, Arizona. 
