...the work of transformation – it’s not matching ourselves to roles that reflect exactly what we did before. It’s metamorphosing into a future state.
I imagine your mind – like mine - is alight with the apt metaphors of this metamorphosis. So was the Radiolab journalist Molly Webster when she reported this story. She said it provoked in her the following thoughts: “It’s not just what we carry forward from our past into the future. It’s the idea, what of my future self is in me right now?”
To truly transform, we don’t have to fully fall apart – though part of it requires descent into a state that looks and feels like goo. What really happens is that there are parts we keep, parts we create or grow, and parts that we must leave behind. There are some hard parts we remember. And all the while, we have the biological means to breathe through it all.
What we let go is as important as what we take on.
That line really strikes me, as does this thought here:
To me, the most amazing part of the story of metamorphosis is that the caterpillar comes with everything it needs to become something else. It is equipped to let the past dissolve and prepared to engineer its own future parts. I like to think, so are we.
-- Katya Andresen
