The Caterpillar

I was watching a caterpillar inch its way up my curtain this morning, and seeing its green ugliness close-up, I had an overwhelming urge to crush it to goo.
 
But I didn't.
 
Why not? Because I knew it was probably only a few days away from turning into a butterfly, and butterflies are some of my most favourite things on the planet. So light, so beautiful, so graceful, and a joy to watch. Even now, I still get a thrill from spotting a new sort of butterfly in my garden, and it makes me so ridiculously happy.
 
But caterpillars are really gross.
 
If you look around today, most people are spiritually in the 'caterpillar' stage of development. They wake up, go to work, eat, work out, watch TV, have families, some of them even talk to their families – but generally, it's not very pretty. A lot of the interactions are clumsy, painful, awkward, 'ugly' affairs, that are the opposite of uplifting and inspiring.
 
We live in a world where most people scream at their kids about stupid things like leaving their shoes in the wrong place; where most spouses ran out of meaningful conversation around 10 years' ago; and where most people switched off their feelings before they were even out of short pants, because they realized that no-one – not even the people who were meant to love them the most – was really that interested.
 
I don't listen to news very much but when I do hear what's going on, it's invariably bad: this massive tornado just set a world-record for destroying things and killing people; that berserk psycho just tried to cut someone's head off in the middle of London; this massive company just went bust, leaving four million people out of work; a member of the Royal Family got fat….
 
Horrible, terrible stuff. It can look so ugly and depressing…until I remember that we are just still in the caterpillar stage, and that any minute now, things are going to change.
 
Let's remind ourselves how one of the ugliest things in the world is transformed into one of the most beautiful things in the world: First, it builds itself a cocoon, where's it's completely cut off from everything that's happening in the outside world (that's the 'religious fanatic' stage, where it opts out of Facebook and throws out the DVDs). Then, it kind of dissolves to mush (this is the part where all our certainties about who we are, and what we're really on the planet to do, and all our other 'false' beliefs evaporate.)
 
Then, miraculously, that mush turns into this light, airy creature that is the undisputed queen of the insect world – but it's still stuck in its cocoon. (This is the part where we've started to rebuild our character, and our personality, and we've chucked out all the bad stuff and tried to replace it with good habits and traits, but we're still pretending to be 'normal' to everyone else. "Yes, of course I believe that statistics and genes are the only thing determining my income, health and marital success!!" "Of course all this weird weather is due to 'global warming'…" "I'd never dream of talking to G-d for an hour a day! Only weak-willed crazy people who can't handle reality would do something that bonkers!)
 
 Then, it has to fight its way out of the cocoon – which if you're a fan of National Geographic, you'll know is an incredibly hard, long, drawn-out process. (This is the part where we know who we really are, and what G-d really wants us to do in the world, but we're still fighting against all the 'opinions', putdowns and nastiness from our friends, family and neighbours.)
 
That part is really not fun. But they did an experiment once, when they took a cocoon and split it open, to make it much easier for the new butterfly to emerge. No fight, no stress, no strain – the butterfly barely lasted 10 seconds. It couldn't fly. That fight to emerge from the cocoon is what gave its wings the strength they needed to function properly. When they skipped that stage, the butterfly's wings were so weak that they were completely useless.
 
I think I finally kicked my way out of that particular cocoon last year. People threw everything they had at me, including 'crazy', 'disrespectful', 'hypocritical', 'unrealistic', 'spiteful' and (the absolute worst thing you could ever call someone else): 'judgemental'.
 
Like I said, it was tough. But now I'm flying around, and I've pretty much forgotten how hard it was to morph from a caterpillar to a butterfly. But geez, I wish everyone else would stop crawling around on the ground, and come join me, already.
 
 
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Check out Rivka Levy's new book The Happy Workshop based on the teachings of Rabbi Shalom Arush