If there is a season for being unemployed, then it has to be winter. The realisation first struck me when I was in my first year of high school, right before one of the Sunday morning accounting classes that would start at 8:45. Between the hours of breakfast and the class, there’d be an assembly, a formal and pointless affair where the head teacher would read notices and highlight mischiefs carried out by students. And in between the assembly and the class, there’d roughly be a fifteen-minute window of which it would take, on average, about five minutes to pack books and another five to get to the classroom.

Thankfully, because my friends and I had opted for a combination of subjects notorious for having the fewest classes, thereby attracting everyone besides the studious bunch, a copy and a pen would suffice, which in turn saved us valuable four minutes.

It was a boarding school, a big one at that, and getting to the classroom required us to go right beside the football field and then downstairs to a cold and dimly lit corridor bordering the toilet from which a foul order always emanated. Depending on who’d come first between me and my seat partner, who belonged to a different hostel, a reservation that involved tossing the singular piece of copy on one of the backbenches would be made.

We were told that this was particularly a non-science faculty problem given that in science combinations requiring diligence, the last seats, due to the thirst for knowledge among students, would always be vacant. Anyways, when that was accomplished, my friends and I would begin the basking ritual.

The football pitch on most days didn’t field any players, so there was nothing, in particular, to look at, and yet most of us would have our eyes glued to the centre of the field, our backs facing the rising sun. The early morning rays would battle the leftover cold from the freezing winter night before and slowly embrace us in its warmth. When the sun’s embrace would get tighter, my eyes would close, like it does with most magical moments in life. It was on those instances when even ten minutes after the bell rang and my friends and I would still be standing in the same spot like immovable objects that I wondered how great life could be if the defiance against it could be sustained and we could forever surrender ourselves to the easy comfort of the winter sun.

Twenty years or so down the line, on a similar cold December morning in Kathmandu, I found myself having a deja vu moment when I almost fell asleep by the familiar embrace of the sun, standing with my arms crossed, with a newspaper in my hand. I had left home, a four-storied inherited building of which three were rented out, with the excuse of a morning walk and vegetable shopping, wearing my full walking attire even though my stop was only three minutes away. As usual, the newspaper store was packed with familiar faces sitting outside on a round table belonging to the tea shop on the other side of the road. I had wished them all good morning, ordered tea and then joined in on the conspiracy-laden political talks.

“Looks like you are about to fall asleep,” said one of my comrades, to which I just smiled.

I looked at my watch, and it had already been an hour and a half since I got there. I reflected on my contributions; I cursed at politicians and appropriated, based on rumours without evidence, the ownership of a new flyover to the son of a revolutionary leader who went corrupt and shared a few economic policies regarding interest rates based on pure raw intuition. Satisfied, I said my goodbyes, walked over to the nearby vegetable store, bought spinach and was about to leave when a fruit vendor whose shop was his own bicycle came pedalling my way.

Suddenly the whole world around me slowed down as the bright orange of the tangerine reflected the sun’s rays back to the skies, creating a halo around it. The perfect companion to a lacklustre winter afternoon. Later as I lay on the rooftop, peeling the cover of a tangerine, sitting over a thick dirty mattress which is always behind the balcony door, I discovered a portion of what I believe people call the greatest joys in life. Merely existing under that warmth and being rejuvenated by the sweetness of the pulp felt enough. I was at ease. I didn’t know when I fell asleep, but when I woke up, it was already three in the afternoon. My head felt slightly heavy, but I shook it off and went downstairs for the afternoon tea my mother always makes.

We sat around the table sharing good day biscuits and conversations about ‘phalanos’. Apparently, some relatives' son, who was a rich consultant, just quit his job in the United States and came back to Nepal to open a farm. When I was in my twenties, I used to enjoy listening to tales that rebelled against society’s expectations. But now I only get unsettled. Because even though I periodically bless myself with the greatest joys of life, there are days I wake up with a gaping hole in my existence that demands a similar leap of courage.

I might have wrapped myself inside a bubble of comfort and can float through life in material convenience, but I feel something is amiss, that even though it is enough for me to merely exist, I have deprived myself of far greater pleasure, which is what one gets to experience after going through pain and discomfort. The pleasure is known as progress, the unravelling of one’s true potential that the person themselves are unaware of.

Perhaps we mistake the brief moments of bliss that grace us every now and then for contentment which is much more than a smile, a burst of laughter or joy or a sudden spike in dopamine. Perhaps contentment is not the presence of these emotions but rather the absence of the unsettling feeling that the puzzle, even though complete, has been pieced incorrectly. And perhaps what we call happiness is merely a reward, and what makes life actually worth it is the stride towards a sense of purpose. I realised that comfort, who was my only companion throughout the day, was also my enemy, depriving me of that purpose. I took the last sip of my tea. The sweetness it provided is now only a memory.

Pandey is an economics graduate from Macquarie University, Australia.