Heroes Not Zombies

Having posted yesterday about a butterfly and the sense of wonder they evoke in me. I came across this little creature later in the garden.

It’s pretty remarkable and beautiful in its own right, but, seriously, it’s nothing like a butterfly!

That thought instantly got me thinking again about life stages and unpredictability. When you reflect on your own life, or of the life of someone you’ve known for decades, it’s striking just how different we all are at age stage of life.

The me as an infant, seems SO different from the me I am now that it’s frankly astonishing. Ok, I know that I am that same person, that I didn’t become someone else in a literal sense. I have this single autobiographical memory and narrative woven from countless threads. I didn’t leave one body and step into another. But when I look back at different stages of my life I can get the strange feeling that I hardly recognise some of those older versions of me at all.

Growth and development are not random, but they are most certainly unpredictable in their details and specificity.

Most of the changes occur gradually and slowly but in every life there are events or experiences which are transformative. When we reflect on who we have become it’s those events which we recall, those turning points, those decisions, those opportunities grasped, those wounds inflicted.

It’s the same with illness. When I tried to understand a particular patient’s illness I had to enable them to tell their story, to recount the transformative events and experiences of their life.

We change all the time, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially. Remarkable as it is, metamorphosis is at the core of ordinary life.