Butterfly Wonderland and the Art of Living

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

• Mary Oliver

Near where I live in Arizona is an attraction called Butterfly Wonderland—a magical (and a little bit kitschy) indoor rainforest in the desert, filled with butterflies. What I really love about Butterfly Wonderland is the movie they play—in a little screening room usually filled with rambunctious kids who just want to get to the butterflies already.

It’s been the same movie for at least a decade, but I’ll never get enough of it. The movie tells the story of a monarch migration from the northern U.S. to central Mexico. It takes three generations to make the 3,000 mile trip; the first butterfly that starts off is the grandmother of the butterfly that finally makes it.

Some people might see this movie as about grit, self-sacrifice, and social conformity: the butterflies setting aside their own individual preferences and comfort to carry out their ancestral arc and reach their destination.

The concept of “grit” is having a bit of a moment these days. We’re told grit is the missing ingredient between a good life and a great one. But maybe that’s not grit at all—it’s just misread passion.

My take: The butterfly movie is actually about the opposite of grit. It’s about honoring your own preferences, not sacrificing them. Sometimes that’s called intuition, or knowing and following your heart.

Finding Direction

We don’t have a problem with the simple explanation that the butterflies “just know” the specific spot in Mexico where conditions are right for them to overwinter, even if we can’t explain how. The answer can be just as simple for us. When we listen to—and honor—what feels right, so-called “grit” comes naturally.

It starts with noticing what actually feels right. If we were astrologists, yoga teachers, or non-traditional medicine practitioners, we might call that “cultivating intuition.” But we are lawyers, so we don’t.

Here’s the important part: notice how you feel about actual experiences. This isn’t the type of thing you can sit in a room and think about abstractly, or take some kind of quiz.

When I was a practicing lawyer, there were some cases that just felt right; the narrative felt good to explain. Other times, I’d tie myself in knots forcing logic into a story that didn’t want to be told. Usually, that feeling of “trying too hard” was a warning that the case was going to be tough to win in front of a jury.

The same “noticing what feels right” works outside the courtroom as well. My Quarterly Appreciations attempt, among other things, to demonstrate how noticing and naming what I like reoriented my life towards a kind of quality I can recognize every day.

Sometimes that noticing leads to big changes. Ultimately, I stopped being a lawyer because I was trying too hard to integrate the demanding job with what felt right for my life—and because I’d saved enough that I didn’t need to keep trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

But many times, honoring our preferences simply means noticing what we like about what we are already doing, or what we already know is good for us. I write about that in Rewired for Joy: How Interest-Driven People Can Learn to Love What is Good for Them. But Robert Pirsig says it better than I ever could in his 1974 classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For Pirsig, the concept of Quality roughly equates to “what you like.” He describes what happens when a person working a dull job starts practicing Quality, i.e., paying attention to what he likes:

If he takes whatever dull job he’s stuck with—and they are all, sooner or later, dull—and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he’s likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person … because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.

I like to think that—at least some of the time—I practiced with Quality and felt the ‘fanning out like waves’ Pirsig described.

Doing What You Like Is Revolutionary

Maybe all of this seems pretty obvious: “Just do what you like.” But I don’t think it is obvious to many of us at all.

When Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 1974, the country was split between those doing what felt good and those sacrificing for a so-called greater good (i.e., grit). That battle hasn’t ended. The world doesn’t just reward people who push through pain for some purported common goal—it depends on them.

Many of us in the legal field find ourselves squarely in the “self sacrifice and grit” camp. We value being tough. Working hard. Doing right by our client. In a profession that glorifies the billable hour, it’s easy to forget that endurance isn’t the same as virtue.

Honoring our own preferences doesn’t (usually) mean turning into degenerates eating bags of marshmallows while binge watching videos of cute pandas. After about the fifth marshmallow, or maybe the 50th panda video, no one’s feeling good anymore—or following their heart. Absent distorting influences like sugar, dopamine, or despair, most of us prefer to do things that are a little bit hard. Our bodies like moving against resistance (lifting weights, running), our minds like thinking against resistance (solving challenging problems). We feel more alive in those circumstances.

But there is danger in dressing up our preferences as virtue. That confusion has us thinking that powering through means we are better people. When our judgment is clouded like that, we can’t recognize when the case should be settled, when we’ve done enough, or when our life needs to change. We’re a butterfly in winter, flying north with all our might.

Learning to hear the voice that tells us which way to fly takes practice—especially for those of us who are logic-centered. But it’s worth it. I hear central Mexico is beautiful in winter.