The Lockdown Is An Ideal Time For Your Metamorphosis
It’s a good time to focus inwards, and emerge with beautiful wings
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Earlier this week, I went out for a stroll. Butterflies roamed freely by the side of the road, chasing the smell of timidly blooming flowers. Suddenly, my thoughts went to my friends and family outside Hong Kong, especially those in Europe and in the US who, unlike these butterflies, were locked up at home.
Butterflies are beautiful. They dance around in the spring breeze flapping their delicate wings and showing off their colors. They seem free and carefree, but it’s not always been like that.
Not long ago, they were nothing more than a worm-like creepy-crawly. An insignificant, flightless bug that couldn’t be further away from the majestic creature of today. To become a butterfly, they literally went through a metamorphosis. They found a secluded spot, closed into themselves, and transformed.
In these days of lockdown and social distancing, some of us feel trapped. Our former routine has been turned upside down, and we spend most of our days indoors. This isn’t not so different from the caterpillar in its pupal stage, that time of seclusion that led to its transformation. Like the caterpillar, you can also emerge from the lockdown as a beautiful butterfly.
Self realization
What does your butterfly form look like? For me, it’s all about happiness through the expression of one’s potential. This is different from the transitory happiness of, say, eating a chocolate cupcake or getting the latest Apple Watch. It’s a form of happiness that lasts, that is self-sustainable, because it doesn’t come from the outside. It comes from within. You are in control.
How can we attain such happiness? And more importantly, what’s this got to do with the lockdown?
To answer the first question, let’s look at Ikigai, a Japanese concept that has gained significant popularity in recent years. The typical translation of Ikigai is “one’s reason to live”, and it’s commonly represented as the intersection between the answer to these questions:
- What do you love doing?
- What are you good at?
- What does the world need?
- What can you get paid for?
This interpretation of Ikigai is somewhat of a modern take, taking hold in Japan in the 1980s, and echoed more recently in self-help books in the West. The alternative interpretation, often neglected in the West, is that of self-sacrifice: putting the needs of the many above the needs of the few, or the self. The two interpretations aren’t as contradictory as they sound. One focuses mainly on the first answer (“what you love doing”), while the other focuses on the third (“what the world needs”). Neither is wrong. The key is finding the balance between the two.
Your Ikigai can be as grandiose as Elon Musk’s SpaceX plan, or it can be as mundane as selling handmade trinkets on Etsy or in the Sunday market. It’s not an aspiration. It’s something concrete that you can do in the world and for the world.
Still, the Ikigai as expressed by the four questions above is still limiting. Philip Glass, the world renowned composer best known for film scores such as the one for The Hours, famously used to make ends meet as a plumber before he could make a living as a professional composer. He didn’t get there till his early 40s. Did his Ikigai change? Or was it always going to be music? To his own admission, he expected to be working day jobs for his whole life. I doubt plumbing was his Ikigai, though.
Plumbing and other odd jobs were a temporary stopgap while the composer underwent his own metamorphosis. He always knew he wanted to be a musician, and he worked on perfecting his trade until he was finally world class. That’s not to say plumbing is inferior to composing music. It just wasn’t Philip Glass’ reason to live.
In the context of the expression of your own potential we discussed earlier, let’s therefore change the second Ikigai question from “what are you good at” to “what can you be good at”. Perhaps this lockdown is a great time to set aside some time to experiment, practice and grow.
Practice, practice, and more practice
I love to create. Be it articles, music, videos, photography or software, I love to make something out of nothing much, to give form to a thought that then I can share with others, and hopefully educate or at least entertain through it. However, the end result of my creative process isn’t always worth sharing. It may not be good enough.
This is highly dependent on the media. Articles and software come out better than photos, while music and videos are at the bottom of the list. Why’s that? Because throughout my life, writing documents and software is where I invested the majority of my time.
If I want to become a videographer, it’s going to take a lot of practice and learning. Also, I might end up as a worse videographer than I am a software engineer or an engineering manager. I won’t know unless I study, practice and improve.
Your path might be the same creative one as mine, or it might be completely different. Maybe you like fixing watches, or planting trees, or unlocking the secrets of biochemistry. Regardless of the specifics, the same still holds true: you need to keep on studying, practicing and strive to improve.
The moment you stop trying to improve, you might as well change path
Just recently, I was watching an old interview of Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen who passed away in 1991. The interview was filmed in 1977, just after the release of the “A Day at the Races” album. To put this in perspective, that’s about one year after the publication of “A Night at the Opera”, Queen’s blockbuster album containing the famous “Bohemian Rhapsody”, written by Mercury himself.
The interview was revealing. When asked about the pressure of having such a big hit to follow up to, the rock star responded something like this: “It was a big hit, but I thought I could write better anyway. [And so I wrote] Somebody to Love, […] by my estimation, from the writing aspect a much better song.” Somebody to Love went double platinum in the US, and it’s still one of the most recognizable tunes from the band to date.
The point is, he didn’t quit after writing one of the most popular songs of the past century. He carried on trying to improve his art, and he did so all the way until the end.
You could argue that Freddie’s talent was way beyond that of an average person, and I wouldn’t disagree. The point is not whether you can become a best selling artist, it’s whether you can achieve your full potential. The focus is not about the money and the accolade, it’s about your service to yourself and to the world.
During the lockdown, as there’s less social pressure, you can carve away some time for yourself without seeming antisocial. That’s why it’s the ideal time to work on your Ikigai.
If you’ve already know what yours is, that’s great. You can use this time to move towards that direction, through practice and refinement of your skills.
If not, no worries. You can start by answering these questions, revised from the classic Ikigai ones:
- What do I love doing?
- What can I be good at?
- Is this something the world needs?
- Can I survive doing it? If not immediately, maybe further down the line.
You can probably answer the first one or two yourself straight away, while the last two require more research and validation. Take your time, you don’t have to come to an answer today. Starting on the path is already good progress.
That’s it for today! I hope you found this article useful, and you now feel inspired to research your path and work towards it. These caterpillar days are bound to end eventually, and I wish we can all emerge at the other and as the beautiful butterflies we can be.
References
- Happiness and the good life in Japan, edited by Wolfram Manzenreiter and Barbara Holthus [Google Books]
- “I expected to have a day job for the rest of my life”, Philip Glass interviewed by Lola Fadulu, The Atlantic [Website]
- An excerpt from Freddie Mercury’s 1977 interview mentioned in the article [YouTube]
