Happiness is a by-product of function

A man has a house. It's a beautiful house, big, unique, spectacularly sited, tastefully furnished, with a fine garden creatively stocked and laid out. The man has worked very hard over many years so that he could buy this house and develop it exactly to the style he wanted. He is so proud of his house. Everybody admires him for the house, for the effort that led to it and the thought invested in it. Every guest leaves profoundly impressed. Every moment he spends in his house or in the garden is a happy one. As he arrives home from work each day, turns into the driveway, his heart sings.

One day he has to make a long journey by car. Crossing a high, empty moorland his car breaks down. The battery of his mobile phone is dead. He sets off on foot, trudging along an unfrequented road through dull, featureless country. Some miles further on there is no relief in the landscape but a track, possibly a farm road, runs off across the moor. Hoping to find a house with a phone he starts following it. He crosses a barely perceptible rise. There is some mist, still no sign of any human habitation. He stops walking, looks round. The public road has vanished and there is nothing familiar to be seen. Where is he? How did he get here? Is it safe? For a moment, in his imagination, he's in his sitting room, feet up, gin and tonic in hand, basking in a little glowing cloud of wellbeing. But the air's getting cold and the mist is thickening to fog. The house is another world, far away and no help at all; family too. He sits down on a tuft of heather, a little damp but not too uncomfortable. A breeze whistles across the moor. Across the track a funny little bird is hopping about, black and dark brown, with a cream-coloured patch at its neck,chirping. At his feet a patch of moss, the most unlikely of subjects, slowly reveals a kaleidoscope of colour: greens, yellows, reds, browns... The mist thins slightly and the grey of the sky begins to lighten.

Will he ever see his house again? Family, friends? No doubt, although they're a million miles away for now, meaningless visions of another existence which may not even have been his, visions from which no consolation flows. But maybe this is enough, to be the thing that, during some finite interval of time, hears the wind, sees the birds and the clouds, watches the light change.