Things that look enviable. When you are learning a sutra, stumbling badly, forgetting, reading the same passage over and over, while monks of course, but also men and women, read it smoothly and easily: you wonder when you will ever be like them.
Once, on an impulse, I went on a pilgrimage to Inari. Around the middle shrine, I was struggling up for no particular reason, enduring it, while people who seemed to have come after me, without the least sign of strain, went on ahead one after another to pray. It was very enviable.
I had set out in a hurry at dawn on the Day of the Horse in the second month (Hatsuuma), but by the time I had walked halfway up the slope it was already about ten in the morning. It even grew hot, and it was truly miserable. "Why, of all days, when there must be other good ones, did I come on this pilgrimage?" I thought, and tears fell. As I rested, worn out, a woman of forty or so, not in proper traveling clothes but just with her robe hitched up, went down the slope telling someone she had met on the road, "I'm doing the pilgrimage seven times. I've done three already. Four more is nothing. I'll be home by the hour of the sheep (two in the afternoon)." In an ordinary place she would never have caught my eye, but at that moment I wished I could become that woman right then.
At Fushimi Inari Taisha, the upper, middle and lower shrines are scattered up Mount Inari to its summit, and pilgrims made the round of them all. From the Heian period, the Inari pilgrimage on Hatsuuma was a great event for the people of the capital, and Sei Shonagon too was climbing the slope out of breath in that crowd.