A New Tomorrow

She looks so calm and composed while others around her bustle like crazy, headless chickens, as if there’s nothing in the world that could possibly ruffle her feathers. A bubble of happiness, making everyone feel that there’s nothing happening in their world that cannot be solved, he thinks he knows everything there is to know about her from the very moment he set his eyes on her, but everything he thinks he knows is incorrect.

Chattering nineteen to the dozen, she raises her brows and stares into the distance, only for a moment, but the mask slips and he notices. Once again, like an old video cassette, flashes of his past start playing in front of him in reverse mode, and finally some things start making sense – as if suddenly the missing pieces of his jigsaw puzzle had unravelled themselves before him, and he actually knows now where those pieces fit.

In that moment, in her, he sees himself again, and only remembers the bygone days…What he was, who he wanted to be, and how passionate he had been about fulfilling his purpose. Unfortunately, life got in the way. He sat in silence, contemplating about all that had happened, moving within as diverse thoughts and ideas filled his head to the brim, probing through the good and bad memories of his life that was now coloured with each and every experience that he’d had.

He stares at her and realizes that she has gone back to wearing her mask. But he just cannot do that anymore. Nor will he let her do that anymore. And as he arrives at that decision, with her, his tomorrows begin. 

Chrysalis

Don’t we all love butterflies? Well, maybe not all – I know my brother was scared of butterflies as a kid (yes, laugh all you want!) – but I’ve always been inspired by them to a huge extent. The first tattoo I got was of a butterfly…

I really feel that Nature is the best teacher. I mean – look at the butterflies! Magnificently hued and the objects of everyone’s envy! But then again, I wonder: what do we envy? We envy their beauty, we envy the fact that they blossomed from relatively ugly, green caterpillars to luminescent self-propelled flowers, if I may put it that way, and we envy everything we cannot be and cannot do. Human nature…

Just some time ago, while reading random facts online, I found out that butterflies have short life-spans. Yes, the longest may be a year, but their average life-span is a mere five days to two weeks. When I read this, I remember thinking to myself that this was yet another example of the law of impermanence in life. Nothing lasts forever. Now, that is both good news and bad news. What really was the point of being so beautiful if your life was merely fourteen days long, at the very best? Ironically, two weeks later, I got the answer to my question. Mother Nature’s mysterious ways cannot be undone; these fractals of our amazing world are here to inspire all of us, if only we paid a little more attention.

The butterfly counts not the days or weeks it has, but the moments it has, and that is time enough…

Today a caterpillar, tomorrow a butterfly. We should never lose hope of what tomorrow might bring. Despite all the heartache, sorrow, pain and insecurities, we are all butterflies waiting to happen. Just when the caterpillar thought life was over, cocooned in darkness and misery, it transformed into a butterfly.

The caterpillar thought, “It is the end of the world.”
The butterfly realized, “It is the beginning of the world.”

The struggles, the battles you fight today, prepare you for tomorrow. They help you develop the strength and make you realize that you need to fly. You might feel that you are about to fall, but butterflies can’t see their wings, can they? They can’t see how beautiful they are, but people around them can. People are like that. We really are butterflies waiting to happen. People are like butterflies and the world is our chrysalis.

A month ago, I found a dead butterfly. It’s not the most common sight. Incandescent green wings, unimaginably beautiful…Dead…It really is not every day that you find a dead butterfly. Until I held it in my hands, its frayed wings, I could have lived in the bubble that butterflies are fairies that come out of nowhere, entertain us with their beauty and disappear into nothingness soon thereafter. But no life is unfair…and fair: an integration of happiness and sadness; change. Change is the only constant. And probably, that is the biggest lesson we can learn from a butterfly.

If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies. If nothing ever changed, clear, blue skies would not follow storms. If nothing ever changed, life would have no meaning.

Just like the butterflies, we will awaken in our own time. We really are just butterflies waiting to happen…