Six months after you move in, the property app sends you the apartment you should have taken.
It has the wide windows you wanted. There is a tree outside them, a room that could actually be called a study, and a kitchen whose drawers presumably open without hitting the oven. The rent is slightly less than yours. You examine the photographs while standing in your own kitchen, where your partner is trying to prise something baked onto a pan.
“Look at this,” you say.
Your partner looks. There is a silence in which the kitchen you occupy becomes smaller.
You signed the lease with reasonable care. You knew about the drawers. The bedroom was quiet, the bus was close, and you liked the way the afternoon light reached the floor. For several weeks you were delighted. You bought a plant. Then the saved search, which nobody had thought to cancel, began delivering evidence.
The first alert was useful information. By the twelfth, you were conducting an appeal against your own life.
There is a short Zen story about a monk called Banzan passing a butcher’s shop. A customer asks for the best piece of meat. The butcher replies, “Everything in my shop is the best,” adding that the customer will find no inferior piece there. Hearing this, Banzan awakens. That is the whole account in [*101 Zen Stories*](https://library.sakyauniversity.com/eBooks/2023/June/6483f79c7b604/101ZenStones.pdf).
The butcher would be unbearable in an online review. Asked a perfectly reasonable question, he offers a proposition that cannot help anyone choose dinner. Some cuts are tender; others need hours in a pot. Some have more fat. A competent butcher knows the differences. The customer has every right to expect assistance.
Yet Banzan hears something that stops him.
The account gives us no access to the monk’s thoughts. We can imagine years of searching, but the story does not supply them. Its strange economy leaves us with a man walking, an ordinary commercial exchange, and a sentence in which the machinery of ranking suddenly has nothing to grip.
If everything is best, the word has ceased to perform its usual work. No item can be promoted by demoting another. The butcher has kept the superlative and removed the ladder.
It is an outrageous move. Much of adult life requires that ladder. We compare rents, read contracts, distinguish a good offer from an exploitative one. A person who could make no distinctions would be easy to cheat. The trouble begins when a faculty that serves us well before a decision acquires permanent jurisdiction afterward.
You chose the apartment. Comparison continues to occupy it.
Now the afternoon light has to compete with the light in a photograph. Your kitchen is assessed against a kitchen in which nobody has ever, to your knowledge, burned a pan. The alternative comes without its upstairs neighbour, its winter draught, its particular smell when the bins need emptying. Your actual home supplies all of its evidence. The other one supplies nine photographs.
The trial is going badly.
There is a peculiar embarrassment in admitting how much this matters. You have a place to live. You know what that means. Gratitude arrives to conduct its own prosecution, and soon you feel both disappointed and ashamed of the disappointment. Now even your response to the kitchen falls short of an imagined response you could be having.
Comparison is wonderfully fertile. Give it one room and it will build another.
The usual advice would be to count the good things: the quiet bedroom, the bus, the plant that has somehow survived. This may help. But the inventory can leave the underlying arrangement intact. You are still gathering favourable testimony, hoping your home will finally win permission to be yours.
The butcher declines to provide that permission. His absurd answer makes the entire hearing difficult to sustain.
I hear a freedom in this that is less comfortable than reassurance. Nothing in the story promises that Banzan has obtained the best possible circumstances. Nothing guarantees his next meal. Awakening occurs within earshot of a customer who still needs to buy meat. The day has its business, and the business will require a choice.
So the choice remains. What loosens, perhaps, is the demand that choosing establish the ultimate worth of the chooser’s life.
That demand can be particularly fierce around things we cannot easily undo. An apartment is a modest example. There is also the city we moved to, the profession we entered, the person whose sleeping breath we know. The unlived alternative remains at the moment before the boxes are unpacked. We lend it the vitality we have withdrawn from what is here.
Some regrets deserve to be followed. A bad lease can be ended; a damaging relationship can be left. Staying has no automatic spiritual distinction. But departure requires its own clear attention. Endless comparison can postpone leaving as effectively as it prevents settling: every possible next life must first defeat every other one.
By then, a longing for certainty has begun to pass for discernment.
Perhaps this is why the butcher’s sentence is so difficult to domesticate. Turn it into “Everything is wonderful” and experience promptly contradicts you. Turn it into advice to make the best of things and you can hear the effortful resignation. His claim remains excessive. The mind reaches for a qualification, a scale, a better question. Banzan, apparently, has a different experience.
Back in the kitchen, your partner has given up on the pan and filled it with water. The listing is still open. You could book a viewing. You could close the alert. Either action might make sense.
Meanwhile your partner is holding the plant. It has grown lopsided toward the window, and the two of you have been meaning to move it.
“Here?” they ask, setting it on the sill.
You look at the leaves against the glass. There is room if you shift the bowl.