Contentment - A Short Story

Night had fallen and as per usual, he was outside, performing his self-assigned duty. He was a middle-aged homeless man, subsisting under the poverty line happily. Because, although he was poor by societal standards, he was rich by personal standards, he may have had no money at his disposal but he still took it upon himself to ensure his cities neighborhoods were kept tidy and that his message was spread. He was a selfless man, by day he would collect cans scattered on the road and sidewalks to recycle them and earn a modicum of change to feed himself and by night he would clean up the day’s accumulation of trash on the streets. For this man, this was not a problem but rather an occupation-opportunity. He sought solace in ensuring the neighborhoods were kept clean for all the children, parents and seniors that inhabited them and in spreading his message. He had no material possessions beyond his clothing, and in this, he was content.

He wasn’t always homeless, quite the opposite. Several years ago, he was living the “good-life.” He had an exorbitant home atop the hill with a view of the entire city, where the rich gaze upon the city-dwellers from their fortresses. He was an accountant for a large corporation, one which sold asbestos-ridden materials to developing countries, countries which had no other option and had no idea how insidious asbestos was. He was perpetuating the capitalism system, preying on the weak and profiting. By any regular means of measurement, he was a success, he made his mommy and daddy proud by suffering through math and accounting courses in university so that he could wear a nice business suit and pollute the world.

It would seem money can, in fact, buy happiness. Until you’ve bought all your happiness. He was very happy living a life fueled by money, in fact, he was relishing it. He had bought numerous cars, some he didn’t even drive, he had filled his home with antiques and lavish furniture, and he decorated his exterior, hiring landscaping companies to upkeep a garden that would even make the Garden of Eden appear inferior. He wasn’t committed to a single mate so he was a free bachelor with an enormous savings account, satisfying his urge to fornicate frequently. Plainly, he appeared to have everything a man could desire from the 21st century.
It all came crumbling down on him when he was diagnosed with lung-cancer, given only a fifty-percent chance of survival. Accordingly, he used his enormous savings account to pay for all the best treatment he could.

When in the hospital however, he witnessed people of all societal classes coping with the same affliction as he, he saw that any and every human is bound by mortality, regardless of wealth. He saw children with no hair and no muscle, skeletons with a layer of skin, he saw seniors who now spent their receding-days bound to a bed, and he saw seemingly healthy young folk confined to a bed, also only given a fifty-percent chance of conquering their ailment. Regardless of his enormous savings account, he now had to rely on his own body and his own instruments, surrounded by people suffering the same affliction and by people suffering even worse afflictions.

By some mystical, perhaps unexplainable stroke of luck, after being told his chances of survival had diminished below fifty-percent to a meager ten-percent, he survived. In the duration of his fight against cancer, however, he developed relationships with other patients who didn’t have the same luck. He talked to people of all ages, got to know them very intimately and even shared a cry with each.

After being omitted from the hospital he systematically relinquished all of his possessions, starting with the contents of his home. How he did it was quite remarkable, he would package things in a box, leaving the receiver unaware of what was contained inside. In the package he would leave a note with a succinct and simple message: “Pay it forward.” Once he had packaged everything he spent the following few weeks walking around aimlessly, knocking on doors and proffering his package to any home or person. He would visit homeless shelters and offer some of the food he had stored in his kitchen and would offer to take them out for lunch or dinner and allow them to order an unlimited amount of whatever they chose. He went to hospitals to encourage patients not to give up in the fight, that with the proper determination and belief they could conquer their ailments and that when they did, their lives would be enriched, not diminished, by the disease.

Presently, he was just beginning his routine nightly-cleanup of some neighborhoods. He would walk with a shopping cart covered by a few flattened plastic bags he had recovered so that small garbage would stay inside. Diligently and happily he was collecting garbage for the sake of everyone else, so that other people don’t have to suffer the inconvenience of garbage.

As he was finishing his last neighborhood around one in the morning, he heard a loud thumping, as though a powerful speaker system was nearby on full volume, playing a series of thoughtless thumps. The music of the youth, he thought to himself. As it grew nearer and nearer he also heard people, it sounded as though they were celebrating something, perhaps a birthday. A limousine, he confirmed when he saw it come into view. Atop the limousine, poking out of the sun-roof was a young man in a nice buttoned up t-shirt and slicked hair, his friends congratulating him, yelling “He’s graduated!” In his hand was a bottle of booze, he was chugging it down like life had no end and consequences were a fabrication. As he emptied the bottle he threw it to the ground just ten meters from the selfless garbage-man, shattering it into hundreds of fragments.

The message behind this story: Just like this, we can chug from the bottle of life with no restraint, as if we’re immortal and there are no consequences, but eventually, just as the bottle of booze becomes empty and shattered by its beholder once it has been saturated, you too will experience the inevitable shatter. When life becomes empty, once you’ve drank the drink and danced the dance of material-pursuit, you will shatter, and how you cope with that shatter is your burden.