Chrysalis. Beneath your Beautiful.

“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.”
― Haruki Murakami

Butterflies. Don't we all love them? Me- I was actually pretty afraid of butterflies till a while ago (yes, yes, laugh all you want), till they actually inspired me to a huge extent. Nature really is the best teacher. Oh these butterflies, magnificently hued and the objects of everyone's envy! But then again, I wonder- what do we envy? We envy their beauty, we envy the fact that they blossomed from relatively ugly little green caterpillars to incandescent self propelled flowers, if I may put it that way and we envy everything that we cannot be, or cannot do. Human nature.

About a month ago, while studying Botany, I came across the fact that butterflies have short life spans. Yes the longest might be a year, but their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days. I remember thinking to myself that this was yet again another example of the Law of Impermanence in life. Nothing lasts forever. That being both good news and bad news. What really was the point of being so beautiful if your life was a mere two weeks long, at the very best? but then, ironically two weeks ago, my question was answered. Mother Nature's mysterious ways that cannot be undone, these fractals of our beautiful world are here to inspire all of us, if only we paid a little more attention.

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
― John Keats

The butterfly counts not the weeks and the months it has, but the moments it has, and that is time enough.

“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince.

Today a caterpillar-tomorrow a butterfly. We should never lose hope of what tomorrow might bring, in spite of all the sorrow and heartache and pain and insecurities, we are all butterflies waiting to happen. Just when the caterpillar thought that it's life was over, cocooned in misery and darkness, it became a butterfly.

"It is the end of the world", said the caterpillar. "It is the beginning of the world", said the butterfly.

The struggle, the battles you fight today, prepare you for tomorrow. Developing the strength that YOU need to fly. You might feel that you are about to fall, but butterflies can't see their wings, can they? They can't see how beautiful they are but everyone around them can. People are like that. We really are all butterflies waiting to happen. People, butterflies, and the world, our chrysalis.

Two weeks ago, my friends found a dead butterfly. Its not the most common sight. Incandescent green wings, unimaginably beautiful. Dead. It really is not everyday that you find a dead butterfly. Until I held it in my hands, its frayed wings, I could have lived in a bubble that butterflies that come out of nowhere, entertain us with their beauty and disappear into nothingness soon thereafter. But no, life is unfair...and fair. An integration of happiness and sadness, change. Change- the only constant. And probably that is the biggest lesson we can ever learn from a butterfly.

If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies. If nothing ever changed, clear blue skies wouldn't follow storms. If nothing ever changed, there would be no meaning to life.

Just like the butterflies, we too will awaken in our own time.

“And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche