What is the caterpillar thinking?

“As a survivor of a brain injury, Rick Bowie is only too well acquainted with the dramatic life changes it brings.” He has an article on “Change Happens” (look down the list for “Change Happens”) that is just down my transitions alley.

“I’ve often wondered what might go on in the mind of a caterpillar when life in the cocoon begins to come to an end. It is about to lose the safety and support of its environment and its known world is coming to an end. Even if it could see a little further into that unknown mystery of the future, it might not even recognize the beauty of the butterfly which was about to appear. Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese Philosopher, said, “when I let go of what I am I become what I might be.”

Sometimes, when the pity party is in full swing, I feel I am like someone sequestered against their will for a long time. I am not here against my will, but, like the long-sequestered, I now fear dealing with The Outside World and getting the gift of re-taking control. Not having any control over my public or private life and not having dealt with TOW for, now three years, but looking and seeming like an insider, it will be a new re-entry syndrome (the end-of-culture-shock re-entry is like this).

Rick goes on to another metaphor, the compost heap of life.

“Over a period, the heap gathers to itself all kinds of unwanted leftovers and wasted refuse. All it needs is time and warmth, and out of it will grow the most delicious tomatoes and pumpkins, the seeds of which at some time were also thrown away as waste. The same thing has been said in many different words by many different people. Sigmund Freud wrote somewhere that “one day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”. The philosopher Nietzsche said ‘unless there be an element of chaos within, you will never give birth to a dancing star’”.

BUT, nice as imagining the happy retrospect when it will all become beautiful and when one will be as a dancing star, this focus is the transitioner's hurrying-to-the-other-side-of-the-street" mistake.

"Transition is the difficult process of letting go of an old situation, suffering the confusing nowhere of in-betweenness, and launching forth again in a new situation. It is the natural process of disorientation and reorientation that marks the turning points of the path of growth. It would be great if transition was like the teleporter of science fiction, where one simply walks into a cabinet and says the equivalent of “beam me up, Scotty”, and whoooosh, and we were there". William Bridges makes much of this.

Hence, the waiting heart, staying with the waiting heart.