How Does One Become A Butterfly?

As a teenager living in Cape Town, I enjoyed walking down Longstreet into the city centre and aimlessly wandering around. I would roam through second-hand clothing shops, bookstores and antique markets. Sometimes I would sell some of my CDs and buy something new, but it wasn’t merely a shopping trip; it was an exploration. One day, in one of these shops, I found a small card with text written on it. It read:

How does one become a butterfly

 It’s when you want to fly so badly that 

     you’re willing to give up being a caterpillar.

I took the card and kept it very safe. At first, it lived in my journal, then in my box of memories. I still have it. It’s in a box, which is in a larger box, which is in our storeroom. For nearly thirty years, I have held on to those words and believed them. I believed that if I wanted to transform badly enough, one day I would. Then I would be a butterfly forever.

I haven’t achieved that permanent transformation yet, and even though I think back to the words on that card at times, I can’t imagine being a soft, free-flying butterfly. I feel more like a buzzing locust that forms part of a deafening swarm. The only sound that can be heard over the buzzing is an impatient clock ticking. 

It feels like my life is broken up into compartments of time. Each compartment exists, somewhere on my spectrum of life. Everywhere I go, everything I do, and the way I speak, derives from my reality of time. It is deeply ingrained and seems like it’s always been like that. My youngest daughter is 6 years old, and she is finally starting to understand concepts of time. I’m so proud of her when she tells me about her daily and weekly schedule and events of the past and upcoming holidays. On the other hand, I’m hearing my 10-year-old daughter say things like, ‘It’s the weekend again? I can’t believe how time flies.’ This makes me want to run to my 6-year-old and make her stop all this learning about time. Once it’s learnt and understood, there is no turning back. Stop! You’re better off without knowing so much about time. 

What do you think about the phrase: Wasting Time?

I’m having a tough week. The grey skies and sudden cold spell have impacted my productivity. Yet, I find myself doing what I always do: fighting the slump and pushing forward. There is a condition engraved within my being, one that measures my worth to what I produce in a set amount of time. It doesn’t want me to waste a moment. 

What would happen if I wasted time? 

Would it all fall to pieces? 

Would I be useless?

I recently read A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. There are so many aspects of this story that I have been thinking about since I finished the book, but the theme of Time has made the biggest impression on me. One character, who has been on my mind, is Haruki (#2). He features in one part of the story, as the father of a Japanese girl Nao. Nao’s family lived in Sunnyvale, California for a big part of Nao’s childhood. Her dad, Haruki, worked as a software programmer but lost his job, and all their money, and the family had to move back to Tokyo. 

Back in Japan, Haruki fell into a state of depression. At first, he pretends to be out looking for work every day, and then he pretends to go to his new ‘fake’ job. Day after day, he sat in a park and waited his time away. He then tries to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train but fails at that too. Some months go by, during which he spends hours reading philosophy books, folding origami insects, and planning his next suicide attempt. We read his story adjacent to his daughter Nao’s story. She is having a devastating time at her new school, where she is being bullied. I felt enraged with this father, who just sat home and wasted his life away, not helping his daughter. I felt anxious for his character, who was wasting so much time and being unproductive. I wondered if he would ever work again. Time was slipping away, and his skills were becoming outdated. He was not providing for his family. He was not helping his daughter. He was so useless. 

But you eventually learn why he finds himself in this position. How his ethical values had led to him losing his job in the U.S. You come to understand why losing his job had been so traumatic, and the deep psychological struggles Haruki had to work through during these long months of idleness. The story unfolds and it is made clear how the origami insects he spent hours creating, led to an eventual plan that would not only help Nao, but also help him get his life back in order, and start a successful company. It hit me hard. He was not wasting time. He was in a way, hibernating, in a depression, in a dark cocoon. Haruki needed that time. Without that time, he wouldn’t have been able to transform. 

This is what my little card had forgotten to say. How does one become a butterfly? You have to spin yourself into a chrysalis and wait. To sit in discomfort and feel the transformation happening.

Time is needed. A pause is needed.

I decided to give myself time. I needed a pause. I thought back to the days when I would wander the streets of Cape Town and discover treasures. I took a morning for myself. We live in Munich, so I wandered down the street from Max-Weber-Platz. I walked past bustling cafes with freshly baked pastries, where the aroma of coffee filled the air. I passed boutiques and antique stores, galleries and markets. The exploration awoke memories and once more, I felt like the version of myself who could allow time to slip, because this version knew that time didn’t really exist.

Then, I came across my treasure, an exhibition of Salvidor Dali named Spellbound. I knew I needed to go in and I knew that there would be a message waiting for me, from Dali.

Do you know any of Salvador Dali’s surrealist paintings? I bet you’ve seen a copy of The Persistence of Memory somewhere in a book or magazine. It is perhaps his most well-known work. It’s the painting with melting clocks. Dali said that he got the idea for this painting from a camembert cheese that had melted in the sun. The clocks in The Persistence of Memory represent different stages of hardness and softness. A hard clock in its original form, represents a relative and linear meaning of time. The softer the clock becomes, the more subjective time becomes. The melting clocks are flexible, they allow us to change the meaning of time. Dali must have been a genius, how else could he have portrayed the problem of time in such an eloquent way?

My clock has been hard and relative to the business of life for much too long. I needed it to soften. Yet, the concept of softening isn’t a pleasant one. Heat is needed, like the camembert cheese that inspired Dali, which sat in the heat until it became soft. Heat can be uncomfortable, it can make you tired, and burn your skin. It’s a process akin to alchemy. It is like a metamorphosis, like when Haruki sat for months, folding origami insects from the pages of his philosophy books. But when the clock softens, time becomes subjective. This is how you turn into a butterfly.  

Then I remembered, I had been a butterfly before. It’s just that you don’t stay a butterfly permanently, like I once assumed. Life is a cycle. There are precious moments in time when we all go through this transformation. Like times when we are going through hard transitions in life. But also in the little moments, like when you give yourself time to wander. It’s not always an easy thing to do. When you read a good book and allow your clock to soften,  receiving meanings and messages within the text. These are things that many of us know, but we sometimes forget. We forget because we are so busy and anxious about wasting time, but it is essential to the metamorphosis cycle.

How does one become a butterfly? 

First, you need to be a caterpillar that experiences life.

Then, you need to sit with your experiences, spin yourself into a pupa and wait.

Finally, you can enjoy a new beginning and see the world from a new perspective.

And then lay your eggs, the new ideas you have formulated, and do it all over again.