We’re all butterflies in the making

I watch people. I think I’ve always watched people.
I look for clues in how they hold their hands, or repeatedly pull on a ball cap as if they are trying to keep their thoughts contained or massage an eyebrow to control a worry.
I look for sad, for weary, for signs of hurting.
I’m not sure why but I do. I create stories in my head, complete with solutions for what I imagine is going wrong. Perhaps I watch to remind myself we are never alone in what we feel.
I’m easily discouraged these days when I listen to the madness of the rhetoric from the U.S. election, and I’m saddened that we in Canada plump up our chests while muttering not in Canada, thereby ignoring our own blemishes.
Easily forgetting the injustice we inflict on each other, seemingly unconcerned of the shocking number of missing and murdered aboriginal women, the list of our own failures stacking up against what we consider appalling in other countries.
Sometimes the lack of answers, and of trying to make sense of the inhumanity that is rampant around the planet, keeps me from sleep. There seems no solution, no remedy for the conflicts in which we engage.
If we had the answers, the understanding, then I suppose there would be little purpose to our existence. Life comes with a whole realm of problems and fears, and maybe it is how we manoeuvre through those difficult waters that gives our life meaning.
Perhaps our purpose is in our very struggle to understand.
My daughter was relaying the story of the butterfly’s journey of transformation to me in one of our recent conversations. It is a story that most of us are familiar with, the metaphor of life, so to speak, but I hadn’t thought of it for quite some time and it makes good sense now, right in this moment.
Let me refresh your memory. The butterfly has to struggle to release itself from the chrysalis in which it developed. If we watch this struggle, it seems the butterfly isn’t going to make it and if we were to only enlarge the hole through which the butterfly is trying to escape, we could make this last journey of the butterfly easier.
We are tempted, but it is the actual physical exertion that forces fluids from the butterfly’s body into the wings to give them shape and size so that the butterfly can fly when it reaches freedom.
If we interfere, we doom the butterfly to death.
So, yes of course, we don’t want those we love to suffer and ache; to feel loss and disappointment. We don’t want anyone to experience this, but we all must push from our own chrysalis.
I think of the times I’ve desperately wanted to save my children, wanted to lift them from their struggle to safety. And I did, repeatedly, but we learn our best lessons from those moments that challenge us.
Even at this ripe age of 61, there still are days when I want my father to come and rescue me, to make it all better, to say there, there, I’ve got this. The child in me wants to be gathered up and kept safe.
We’re all butterflies in the making—each one of us with our beautiful wings.
We must try to be patient as we search for answers.
wendistewart@live.ca