There’s something miraculous about the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Imagine for a moment you wouldn’t know caterpillars turn into butterflies, and you observe a caterpillar sitting on a tree, munching some leaves.
Then you go on with your day. A few weeks pass, and you find yourself in front of the same tree, and you see that same creature again: only this time in the form of a butterfly.
Not in a million years would you think that this is the same creature like the caterpillar you observed a few weeks back. Nothing about this butterfly even remotely resembles the caterpillar. It’s not just the body of a caterpillar with wings grown.
While the caterpillar was wrapped up in its cocoon, it digested itself, turned itself into a biological soup where a few groups of cells stuck together more closely. If you’d pop open a cocoon at the right time, all you’d find inside would be liquid: butterfly soup.
I don’t think butterflies remember that they once were caterpillars any more than we remember what it was like being an embryo.
Which makes me wonder: To truly change and transform, do we need to dissolve the old? And not just the old itself, but even the memory of it?
I cherish my memories, even the bad ones, for all of it made me who I am today. But I also do understand the desire to forget, and I wonder if this desire to forget painful memories is sometime more than just protective mechanism. We should probably work through suppressed memories, learn to disassociate ourselves from them, be able to view past trauma without letting its echoes reverberate into our present and future. But is there maybe a deeper wisdom in nature’s underlying mechanism of forgetting?
I don’t know the answer to this, but I find it an interesting question to ponder.
Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.
— Hermann Hesse
