I’ve said it before and I am saying it now :
For every butterfly that is born, a caterpillar dies.
And if your image of yourself is fixed at “caterpillar” and that can never ever change, you too will die. After all, you have only ever known life as a caterpillar, then to become a butterfly is to lose everything that you have ever known. Is that not death?
It’s also to have what you know about yourself change. The exact version of yourself currently alive will absolutely disappear from the face of the earth, never to be seen again, and is that not death?
No matter how you look at it, a caterpillar dies. And you’re that caterpillar. So you’re dead. You died. That’s just logic. Right?
Or is it?
After all, you weren’t always as you are now. You were an infant when you were born, and since then, you went through all the stages of childhood, and during no point of that process did you look like you do now.
Scientifically speaking, not a single cell of you that was there the day you were born is still here today. You have, in fact, had a complete change of damned near everything every seven years or so since the day you were born.
Not only that, your mind, heart, and soul have changed too. And not just since childhood either. Even as an adult, you’ve seen the way you look at things change over the years. Odds are, the person you were even as recently as five years ago wouldn’t even recognize the person who you are today.
And yet you’re still you. You’re the same person who has always answered to your name. You remember all those other stages of your life and all those moments you spent as someone a lot different than who you are now. And yet, you’re still you.
Clearly, then, there is something about you that remains the same even though seemingly everything about you changes.
Something that we call “you”. Something that WAS a caterpillar that BECOMES a butterfly.
You even know, if you think about it (and you try not to, because it’s weird), that you will be different in the future too. You’ll get older and slower and hopefully wiser. You’ll see everyone you know change too. Spouses, kids, friends, relatives, even the famous people you see on TV. they are all going to change just like you are.
And some day they are all going to die, just like you are. One second there is someone there, and the next… there isn’t.
But maybe death is just another transformation too. Maybe it seems like we’ll be dead forever but in reality, we just turn into another kind of butterfly.
After all, if we can still be ourselves through our entire trip from nursery ward to hospice care, maybe we can still be ourselves after death, too.
Maybe we turn into something as incomprehensible to us as a butterfly is to a caterpillar, and we were therefore just as dead to our caterpillar selves.
But our real selves live on.
More after the break.
A profound movement
[TRIGGER WARNING : Poop and pooping. ]
As always, I will try not to be too explicit or gross.
So I wake up in the late afternoon after having had a productive blogging session earlier and once I am sufficiently wake, I notice that I am feeling rather full.
Like I am smuggling a medicine ball and a hundred steel ball bearings in my lower gut that I swallowed under extreme duress.
So I head for the bathroom and by the time I am seated, I am alarmingly aware that something truly profound is about to occur.
Like I was about to give birth to a freaking beluga.
What followed was not the most dramatic time I have spent on the toilet, nor was it the most painful, but it sure as heck was the most…. productive?
I pooped a hell of a lot, is what I am saying. Like, enough to have to flush twice. And the whole time I was wondering where in the hell I had been keeping it all.
Same thing that happens with me and pee sometimes. I swear.it is like I have this extra-dimensional space where excess effluvia are stored until one day it gets full and then suddenly the whole supply dumps back into the main storage tank.
And then I have a lot of painful work to do.
So yeah. By the time I was done, there was very little room left in the bowl. And even after all that work, I still felt (and feel) like there is a whole lot more to come.
But I sat there for another 20 minutes without any movement (snrk) so despite the feeling that someone tied a knot in my guts (complete with bow) and that I still have a quart of bricks in there, there’s nothing I can do about it now.
Now, we play the waiting game.
Pinky : And how do you play that, then?
Me : You wait.
Pinky : Oh I see. (thinks for a moment) Not really much of a game then, is it?
Now with hindsight (snrk!), I wonder if this logjam was responsible for all my back pain this week, Such clogs have been known to be connected with back pain in my past, and this could be a severe manifestation of that.
If so, I will be slightly embarrassed to say so at Doctor Chao’s office tomorrow.
I will have to see if the symptoms disappear when the blockage is gone. In a way, I sort of hope they don’t.
Less to have to explain about my bowels to my GP, the better!
But I imagine they will. It makes too much sense given my history. And I will have to talk to my GP about pooping.
While I am there, I will bring up my lungs. They ain’t working right either.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.