The Art of Purring (The Dalai Lama's Cat 2)

For a while all three humans watched in silence as I lapped up the milk with a lusty purr. Was it feline telepathy or just my imagination that Sam wasn’t pleased to have Lobsang join their usual end-of-the-day get-together?

Serena asked Lobsang about the project he was currently working on, and he mentioned the commentary on an esoteric text by Pabongka Rinpoche that he was helping translate. Then conversation moved on to what had happened during the day. Serena told them about her encounter with Mrs. Finlay, and how Mr. Finlay’s hard-fought vision for early retirement had turned out to be such a bitter disappointment.

Lobsang listened to the story, sympathy pervading his immense calm, before he said, “There are few of us, I think, who don’t make the same mistake. Believing in I’ll be happy when I retire. When I have such and such an amount of money. When I achieve this particular goal.” He paused, smiling at the absurdity of it. “We create our own superstitions and then persuade ourselves to believe in them.”

“Superstitions?” challenged Sam.

Lobsang nodded. “Inventing a relationship between two things that have no connection, like a broken mirror and bad luck, or a black cat and good luck.”

Lifting my face from the saucer, I looked over at him at that precise moment. All three of them laughed.

“Or a Himalayan cat,” offered Serena, “and extreme good luck.”

I resumed my lapping.

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Lobsang continued. “We begin to believe that our happiness depends on a certain outcome or person or lifestyle. That’s the superstition.”

“But I have shelves and shelves here”—Sam gestured behind him—“filled with books on goal-setting and positive thinking and manifesting abundance. Are you saying they’re all wrong?”

Lobsang chuckled. “Oh, no, that’s not what I mean. It can be useful to have goals. Purpose. But we should never believe that our happiness depends on achieving them. The two are really quite separate.”

There was silence while Sam and Serena digested this, broken only by the sound of my lapping and the dogs’ snuffling for crumbs under the table.

“If any object, achievement, or relationship was a true cause of happiness, then whoever had such a thing should be happy. But no such thing has ever been found,” continued Lobsang. “What’s saddest of all is that if we believe that our happiness depends on something we don’t currently have, then we can’t be happy here and now. Yet here and now is the only time we can be happy. We can’t be happy in the future; it doesn’t yet exist.”

“And when the future arrives,” reflected Serena, “we discover that whatever we believed would give us happiness doesn’t make us as happy as we thought. Look at Gordon Finlay.”

“Exactly,” Lobsang said.

Sam was shifting in his seat. “There was a neuroscience study on this not so long ago. I think it was called ‘The Disappointment of Success.’ It looked at pregoal attainment versus postgoal attainment. Pregoal attainment—the positive feeling people get working toward a goal—is more intense and enduring in terms of brain activity than postgoal attainment, which elicits a short-lived feeling of release.”

“Followed by the question, Is that all there is?” suggested Serena.

“The journey really is more important than the destination,” confirmed Lobsang.

“Which only makes me wonder all the more about going back to Europe,” said Serena.

“You might stay?” Lobsang asked, his voice full of hope. When she looked at him, he held her gaze, not just for one or two seconds but until she looked away.

“The night of the Indian banquet was the start of it,” Serena explained. “It made me realize how much more fulfilling it is to work for people who really appreciate what I’m doing, instead of for people who go out just to be seen in the right places. Why put myself through all that stress? Look at what happened to Gordon Finlay. He’s one of the greatest success stories of the decade in the restaurant world. His success is what tens of thousands of people aspire to. But it made him such a workaholic that he just can’t stop. What’s the point of having all the success in the world if you have no inner peace?”

Beneath Serena’s words I detected other unspoken concerns. Over the past weeks, I’d watched her greeting old school friends who came to visit with their husbands and children. Each time it seemed to me that she was feeling pulled in a very different direction.

The next morning, Gordon Finlay arrived at 10:30 A.M. From the moment he entered the café he looked like a man unburdened. Making his way to his banquette, he ordered an espresso and chose a copy of The Times of India from the newsstand.

After flicking through the paper and finishing his coffee, he got up and approached Serena at the counter. “My wife tells me she came in yesterday and you were very kind to her,” he began in his Scottish burr. “I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate that. Just as I appreciate your … discretion.”

“Oh! You’re welcome.”

“This place has been like an oasis for me,” he continued, glancing at the Buddhist thangkas hanging on the walls. “We’ve decided to go home. No idea what I’m going to do, but I can’t sit around drinking two bottles of wine a day. My liver wouldn’t last long.”

“I’m sorry things haven’t worked out the way you planned,” said Serena. Then almost as an afterthought she added, “I hope there was something about India that you enjoyed?”

Gordon Finlay looked thoughtful for a moment before he nodded. “Funny, the thing that immediately springs to mind is helping that kid down the road get his act together.”

Serena laughed. “Happy Chicken?”