Ram Dass has a couple pages on Caterpillars and Butterflies in Be Here Now and his other works. There was a quote that stuck with me for several days: As long as he's busy being a caterpillar he can't be a butterfly.
Obviously, there's more to the point Dass was making, but this phrasing stuck in my head. I've thought for a long while that I'm in the "butterfly" stage of my life. My kids are the caterpillars to support into their adulthood.
I'm starting to realize I'm still a caterpillar. Maybe the kids are larvae still? There is much for me to learn. Maybe the realization of this is the beginning of the chrysalis stage?
I did a little research (I'm still an engineer, after all). So I looked up the life stages of a butterfly:
Egg 3-5 days,
Larva 5-10 days,
Chrysalis 7-10 days,
Butterfly 14 days.
Total lifespan from egg to elderly butterfly is 68 days. So now let's map this to a human time scale. Keeping the math simple, let's set our elderly butterfly to 85 years. That means 1.25 butterfly days = 1 human year. So when does the "butterfly stage" start? 42.5 years.
I will turn 42.5 on August 1, 2014.
Time to let go of my caterpillarness.
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