A young boy found a cocoon. Each day, he held it up to the light to admire his discovery.
One day, a small opening appeared in the wall of the cocoon. He watched the tiny creature within struggle for hours to force its body through the tiny hole. Then it seemed to stop trying. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could go.
So the boy decided to help. He took a pair of scissors and opened the hole so that the butterfly could come out more easily. It quickly emerged. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.
The boy expected the butterfly to take flight at any moment. The longer he watched, the more he realized that the swollen body with shriveled wings would never fly. It was too bloated and weak, spending its pitiful existence floundering on the ground until it soon died exhausted from trying to start living.
What the boy did not realize was what the butterfly actually needed. It needed to struggle to emerge from its confinement because that is the way the fluids of its body are extended to its newly formed wings so it can fly as soon as it frees itself.
Although we may fear encountering them and believe that to have them is to admit weakness, struggles are not the true problems we face in our lives. To the contrary, they are very often the means of our freedom from that which seeks to cast our souls, minds and spirits into melancholic bondage and dispirited living.
The true problems we have are those that are caused by our insistence that we have no problems in our lives, and, if we do, that the solutions be quickly and easily found. When we attempt to circumvent the demanding (and sometimes longer-than-desired) process of honestly dealing with our difficulties, we wind up demeaning the significance of any resolution to those difficulties that eventually may ensue.
Struggling is something you must do in your own time, in your own way and for your own reasons. Always remember that to avoid struggle is to shun victory. There is a time to struggle and a time to let it go and assess the degree of victory your struggling has yielded. When struggling defines your daily living, you’ve lost the meaning of why you’re struggling in the first place. Struggles result in peacefulness or they simply serve to exacerbate existing despair.
When next you find yourself struggling with something in your life, know that it is a process at the end of which is a victory of unimagined proportions and benefits. In other words, “this, too, shall pass” – and it will pass into a state of being that now knows how to fly beyond it’s present state of spiritual and mental confinement. At the end of your struggles await peacefulness and wholeness – the home of your better Self.
Note well: the end of your struggle happens only when you realize that you no longer need to struggle to be your better Self. This, indeed, is good news!
