“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

The ultimate wish for most people is to find happiness in life. We spend our lives searching for this elusive, shadowy concept, never completely sure what it is we are looking for. Perhaps we live subconsciously with the belief that we’ll know it when we see it, and that at any rate, happiness is too complicated a term to be pinned down and defined like any plain word in a dictionary.

Nevertheless, I could not help but feel that something was amiss from the idea that happiness was undefinable; I did not want to spend my life looking for something that I didn’t understand. What is happiness? This question plagued me. I had an irrational desire to categorize myself and every experience I had, to be able to say that “this brings me happiness” with complete certainty. I wanted to know what happiness was to me, outside of some subjective feeling caused by chemicals in my brain.

It was while pondering over this question that I remembered reading somewhere that “happiness is a butterfly.” I’ll admit, I was at first taken with the poetry of the statement more than anything else. I didn’t understand what it meant but liked the way it rolled off my tongue. “Happiness is a butterfly” made me think of monarch butterflies munching on milkweeds in the backyard; it made me think of laughter and springtime and beauty and all things deemed pure.

This led me to think that maybe happiness was a purified experience stemming from some undefinable state of “goodness,” and which was, like happiness itself, intangible and could not be understood as a singular word but rather as an entire idea…an idea which I was unable to fully grasp. I began to think that happiness as a byproduct of virtue was the closest definition I was going to get. It was making sense in my head as well, since prosocial people tend to be happier and I felt intuitively that virtue and happiness were intertwined. That is- happiness and “goodness” were to some extent reciprocal.

Yet this was an incomplete definition of happiness. It felt as though by defining happiness as a byproduct of virtue, I had turned it into a transactional commodity. By transactional commodity, I mean that it now felt that happiness was a payment one got for being good. It was as though one should be kind so they can feel good about themselves; happiness, then, appeared to be a self-centered emotion. Upon further reflection though, I realized that what I was describing was not exactly happiness but pride. Pride is transactional and self-centered, and I quickly realized that pride did not equate to happiness.

My original question still remained then: what is happiness? To answer this question for myself, I first thought about all the things that made me happy, assuming that basic needs (i.e. food, water, shelter, etc.) were met. The two essential components I found for happiness were having a healthy balance between acceptance and optimism. There are some things that are simply immovable and cannot be changed; there is no rewind button to the past. Trying to recreate the past or ruminating over events that have already happened will leave one unfulfilled. It reminds me of the moment in The Great Gatsby, where Jay Gatsby nearly breaks the clock when he reintroduces himself to Daisy after five years. The clock represents Gatsby’s deep-seated wish to ignore the passing of time and replicate the past in hope of creating a happy future with Daisy. Yet, the novel has a tragic end that exemplifies the futility of his struggle (no spoilers).

On a more positive note though, acceptance can lead to gratitude (and greater happiness) about one’s current situation. Acceptance is the understanding that after a certain point what will happen, will happen. We can do our best to get a certain outcome, and this may greatly increase the chances of the desired outcome occurring, but there is always a chance that despite our efforts we won’t get what we want. There is comfort, however, in acceptance. The world will still turn, and so we can choose to be happy.

Equally important as having acceptance is having optimism. Optimism can be thought of as having hope and confidence for the future, having the belief that good must prevail against evil. It is the expectation of fulfillment. The reason optimism is so essential is because it creates drive. If you were to begin an activity with no real belief that you can succeed, logically you have no reason to invest effort into that activity. Optimism not only motivates you, it gives you a sense of purpose. Having a sense of purpose allows you to view your life as worthwhile and valuable, and this optimistic mindset lends itself to happiness. The Japanese concept of ikigai, or “reason for being”, involves this vital sense of purpose in one’s life. But before you can delve into a purpose, you need to be optimistic and believe you will find your purpose.

While being optimistic may at first appear contradictory to acceptance, because optimism involves a hope for the future and acceptance involves understanding that sometimes certain outcomes aren’t possible, this is not necessarily the case. Having hope or optimism does not mean that you absolutely believe that you will get a certain outcome, but is instead a reframing of your mindset. Optimism is the idea that you have a purpose that can be worked towards, and even if you don’t achieve the ultimate goal, there are still benefits and rewards gained throughout the process that have helped you create worthwhile change. When you are optimistic about the future, you view each day as a day of opportunity. You believe that the world, yourself, and your circumstance can get better. It’s the realization, and the consequent joy, that arises from realizing that flowers can grow from cracks in the road.

Both the concepts of acceptance and optimism are not something that can be “achieved” in the traditional sense, nor do acceptance and optimism arise naturally. If anything, we often have to fight our wired, evolutionary instincts to think of worst case scenarios for the future and the difficulty we have accepting losses. The perfect combination is difficult to attain and can be fleeting. We all fall into the trap of tying our idea of happiness with end results, forgetting the ideals necessary to our happiness along the way. In this respect, happiness is short-lived, because people so often chase after end goals thinking that they will “achieve” happiness, only realizing in brief moments that happiness is a mindset that is already within our capacity.

I realize that I have not yet given a concrete definition of happiness, which is what I initially set out to do. Instead, I used two abstract concepts (acceptance and optimism) to define another abstract concept (happiness), and I confess that this was my best definition of happiness.

Nathaniel Hawthorne spoke more clearly when he said that “Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” I took this to mean that if you chase after happiness, it will elude you, just like how butterflies always fly away upon being chased by a puppy. But in the moments where we reflect and reframe ourselves, when we accept our current circumstances while remaining hopeful for the future, happiness comes naturally. 

As always, thank you so much for reading, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

May happiness alight upon you 🙂