On Happiness

When I was young, I tried to catch butterflies.

In Helmbridge—the catholic boys’ club my mother would drop me off at on Saturday’s—, while everyone else played football, I would skulk off to the hedges where snow coloured butterflies would perch, and try to snag one. But they always slipped through my fingers.

I stumbled upon writing, then tripped and fell into art. Years passed and they became less of what I did, and more of what I was. But there was that school of thought which said, “Do what makes you happy.” And, I never understood that.

I look at art like work. Beautiful, escapist, wonderful, work. I try my best to show up everyday like one would in medical school, or law. Some days I’m excited to work and I can feel the juices flowing, on other days I want to launch myself off my balcony. But still I try, as much as possible, to show up.

Writing and art, as far as I am aware, have never made me happy.

But, if it’s never made me happy, why do I do it everyday with so much love?

When I’m working on a book, or a painting, I am feeling a lot of things. I’m confronted with this task in front of me that I’m, truly, not sure I can accomplish. I feel scared, then angry, then sad, then approach it with a childish stubbornness that hasn’t been beaten out of me yet.

It’s like a marriage and your partner drives you crazy. But you made the oath and now you have to work it out. Somehow. For better or worse. In sickness, or in health. Till death parts you both.

My work is my greatest love.

I used to think happiness was completion. That from the day we’re born, we are incomplete jigsaw puzzles, searching for our missing pieces. I used to think of happiness as the ‘aha!’ moment when you finally found the goddamn piece you had been searching for all this time.

I don’t think so anymore.

I don’t think happiness is an event, or a feeling. I think it’s what happens when you look at your woefully incomplete jigsaw puzzle, and besides yourself, you smile, because the picture, while incomplete and imperfect, beaten up and upside down, is still the most beautiful thing in the world. And you wouldn’t have it any other way.

When I’m working, it’s like I can feel my veins tightening and my spirit stretching. I feel my blood boil and my eyes narrow. My brain pulls out its calculator and we’re deep in the trenches. The problem is in front of me, and by God, we’ll solve it. My work doesn’t make me happy; it makes me alive. And sometimes, like a white butterfly flapping in the hedges, happiness finds me there.