Metamorphosis

There’s no doubt in my mind, and even more importantly my soul, that I am going through some sort of metamorphosis, changing from the caterpillar, into the chrysalis, into the butterfly. I’m not sure how or why, but I am sure of this – it’s happening, like it or not. Truth be told it’s a little scary, and even more than a little bit uncomfortable and painful but in its own, “natural” way, sort of exciting.

I wonder what the caterpillar would think if you told it that to become the butterfly it is destined to become, it had to give up everything it was to the point of being completely unrecognizable and had to disintegrate into a soupy mix that would eventually become the butterfly. Probably, “What? No thanks! I’ll just stay a happy little creeping, crawling caterpillar. Besides flying is way overrated anyway.”

In all honesty, I get it, and isn’t that what most of us do? Fly? Who wants to fly and become something extraordinary if it means having to go through some painful metamorphosis? No thanks.

I’m not sure exactly what the caterpillar experiences in terms of pain, I’ve never had one come back and let me know, but given that we’re slightly more advanced than a caterpillar, and I have experienced it first hand, I know for certain that humans experience pain, and if there’s one thing more than anything else in the world humans want, it’s to avoid pain at all costs… even if it means never “flying”.

Pain, the teacher we fear the most, yet is the most competent, and historically the most successful, in teaching us lessons we understand and remember at the deepest levels of human existence. Virtually everyone I know, including myself if pushed on the subject, would have to confess that the majority of their growth as a person has come through the trials and painful experiences that we so strenuously try to avoid. Painful experiences such as the loss of a loved one, divorce, loss of a job, betrayal of trust, friends turning out to be "not-so-much", financial loss, the list goes on and on, but all of them teach us valuable lessons, and for better or worse, mold and shape us into who we are.

One of the questions that nags at me periodically is: if pain is in many ways the best teacher, and it is, in helping us grow, why do we so vigorously try to avoid the unavoidable? Why can’t we find it in ourselves to embrace the inevitability of it, and instead of reacting the way we usually do, with our indignant questioning of how this could possibly happen to me, simply and humbly ask, “What am I supposed to learn from this?”

In his own way, my Dad understood this simple yet deep truth. I lost my Dad to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, over twenty years ago. For the last seven years of his all-too-short life, I watched the man I loved and adored, my Dad, fight this awful, uncompromising, debilitating, degenerative disease, and in the process felt myself getting angrier and more upset with each passing day.

One day early on before the disease had progressed to the point of robbing him of his ability to speak, my Dad noticed my pain and asked what was wrong. I explained that I didn’t understand why of all people something like this (ALS) had to happen to him, one of the kindest, gentlest souls I have ever known. Without hesitation, and with all the love within him, he looked at me in my pain and simply asked, “Why not me?”

Somehow, somewhere deep in my soul I knew he was right but I couldn’t find the courage to admit it… thankfully he did. I found an even deeper love for my Dad that day. Even now as I write I can still feel the pain almost as intensely as I did over twenty years ago when we said goodbye. Yet I can’t help but think how amazingly blessed I am to have had this amazing man as my Dad for forty-one years and to have loved so deeply that it can still hurt so much over twenty years later.

I have read in a number of different places that on the list of phobias (fears), the fear of change actually ranks higher than the fear of death, and on a lot of lists ranks number one. The truth is people fear what they don’t know, which is why we stay in bad relationships and at bad jobs with people who don’t appreciate us, or our gifts and talents. We rationalize that even though they may be bad, at least we know what to expect, I know what I’m getting.

There’s no question that change can be painful, whether it’s leaving the home we grew up in, leaving friends and family behind to take that promising job on the other side of the country, watching our children grow up and head out on their own, leaving that job we hoped would work out, or saying goodbye to those we love because they are needed more in heaven than here on earth… change can hurt.

But to avoid pain, or at the very least, the possibility of pain is to avoid our potential. It’s to deny who we are and who we can become. When we understand that we can embrace the pain and allow it to teach us the hard lessons it has to teach. We can let it remind us of the things we have to be grateful for (like my Dad), and the things we need to do our best to avoid in the future. When we let it become a part of who we are and allow it to help us grow into who we can become, then and only then can we embrace all of what we are.

Pain is not the enemy, our refusal to accept the inevitability of it is; our insistence on running from it and avoiding it at all costs is.

I am going through a metamorphosis, a difficult, sometimes painful struggle to become who I can be. I don’t know where I’m going or where I’ll wind up, but I know that because of the pain I’m growing, and that’s a good thing, a very good thing.