By Taylor Plimpton
“Have you seen the snow leopard yet? No. Isn’t that wonderful?”
—Peter Matthiessen
This morning, my son, Ollie, and I watched as a rabbit eased under the fence into our back yard, and Brooklyn immediately gave chase. It’s a small yard, and the whole thing was over pretty quick—a few seconds, a couple of jukes, and the rabbit had squeezed under the fence on the far side, and my dog was standing there, rabbitless, wagging her tail.
This is the key part of it to me—she didn’t have that sort of dejected, dim-witted look that predators sometimes get when they fail at the hunt, and effect a look of forced nonchalance—like that lion wasn’t actually interested in catching that gazelle anyway, and that red-tailed hawk just happened to be flying near that squirrel, and had never actually intended on eating it in the first place. Brooklyn, on the other hand, truly seemed like she didn’t care that she hadn’t caught the rabbit—she just stood there happily wagging her tail like, Where’d it go? I wish it would come back so I could chase it again!
Besides, I’m not sure she would have known what to do with it even if she somehow had caught it: Played with it? Cuddled it? Shaken it ferociously till its neck snapped? The point is, for Brooklyn, the chase was enough. In fact, if she could do it all over again with exactly the same objectively disappointing result, she happily would.
It is a lovely quality—to not care too much about getting somewhere. The way there, after all, can be so much fun.
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The whole thing has gotten me thinking about the “pursuit of Happiness,” which apparently is our God-given right as Americans. And let’s not forget Life and Liberty either, except those the Declaration of Independence guarantees us without qualification—happiness, not so much. We tend to forget this, or misinterpret the meaning of the phrase, thinking somehow that happiness, too, is our inalienable right, when apparently all we’re really entitled to is its pursuit—which could be the same thing but so often isn’t.
It’s such an American energy—this kind of a pursuit—we love chasing things (especially ethereal things like happiness that resist being caught). Actually, maybe it’s not so much an American energy as it is a human energy—or perhaps, even broader, a life energy. Pursuit belongs to all forms of existence, after all (dogs, clearly, too). Food, water, warmth, love. All life must chase these things to persist. One might even say that the energy of the chase is life. To be after something is to be alive.
And yet the chase can get us into so much trouble, if we’re not careful. It can easily become a kind of obsession—the way, defining ourselves as seekers, we’re forever after something, always on our way somewhere, and thus never really arriving. And sure, there’s something kind of fun about it: the way this urge for more in the pit of our stomachs drives us out into the world, into strange forests and up pointless mountains—and ultimately, deep into ourselves, too. The problem is, there’s just no end to it. Our eyes forever peer over the horizon, to where the following day we’ll be standing, peering over the horizon after that.
Happiness is perhaps a particularly sad thing to pursue in this manner. After all, the nature of any search is that it separates us from the thing we seek—there must be a distance to cross to attain it—and so if it’s happiness you’re after, it’s like you’re necessarily classifying yourself as unhappy. And when you place your happiness on the other shore, you risk removing it from yourself indefinitely, chasing it forever off into the distance. Or, to put it another way: As soon as you search for something, you miss it. Yes, in defining yourself as a seeker, you define yourself as incomplete—and oh, to say this about yourself, to label yourself as someone who’s not perfect and whole and happy just as you are, it’s such an act of great self-harm.
Brooklyn loves chasing things—rabbits, squirrels, birds, tennis balls—but she does not chase happiness. Indeed, my dog’s happiness seems based on no attainment. It’s who she is, rather than something she’s after. It’s about her way there, rather than anywhere she’s going.
And when she is after something—say, for instance, the tennis ball, which is one of Brooklyn’s great obsessions—it’s not really about “getting” the ball, or in some way “possessing” it—it’s about the chase. After all, as soon as she runs it down, she trots it right back over to you so you’ll throw it again, and she can go after it once more.
Yes, Brooklyn enjoys every instant of the process, not just the end-result. When I hold the ball, poised to throw it, she stands there looking up at me intently, quivering with expectation. When I release the ball, she thunders after it like a little racehorse, each paw-step a joyful end in and of itself. And when she finally captures it, she jogs back over to me proudly with the ball in her teeth, dripping with pride and satisfaction (and a little slobber, too) so we can repeat the whole process again.
But sometimes the best part of the search is indeed the end of it—whether you find what you were looking for or not. Because there’s this wonderful raw feeling that can happen when you don’t get the thing you were after—when you’re all dreamed out, and all those tunnels of longing collapse in on themselves, leaving you with nothing—or rather, with only what you already had all along. Except now it is enough. Now you’re too bone-tired and happy to want anything else.
You should see Brooklyn when she’s all chased out—when the rabbit has squeezed under the fence; and the birds have flittered out of reach; and the ball lies dormant next to her, released from those teeth: She collapses happily in the long July grass, stretches out good and long, and I swear to God she’s smiling—her eyes squinted shut contentedly, her big-toothed mouth panting and grinning. For a moment or two at least, she’s not after anything at all anymore, and you can tell it feels pretty good.
It’s Ok to go after things—that’s who we are—we just need to remember to take this whole ridiculous search thing more lightly. Because there is of course no guarantee that we will ever capture the things we’re after—love, happiness, wealth, enlightenment—but we can learn to delight in the chase itself. Yes, as Brooklyn reminds us, it’s not about the pursuit of happiness, but the happiness of pursuit—the great joy of the wind in our hair. After all, no matter what you’re after, if you allow yourself to be happy along the Way, then you’ve already arrived.