My friend Emily struggling with cancer wrote:
When I was sick, my life had contracted to the smallest possible
size, the most microscopic of meanings: simply
surviving. I lost touch with so much of my own sense of capability
and energy and strength. I was just trying to
keep on living, however dysfunctionally."
I believe that most of us if truly honest with ourselves know what it is to simply survive. Many of us have been cursed and in turn blessed as life thrusts us into a process undeniably bound to grow. She asked how she could be so angry with cancer and so grateful to engage in this kind of self discovery.
This is the very process of metamorphosis thrust upon us in lives greatest challenges…Divorce…bankruptcy…Illness etc. They are the transformation.
The Kabbalah states that not only can man transform, but he must in order to fulfill the purpose of creation. The butterfly must fight its way out of the cocoon. Break its way into the light, come to find its own strength or it will never be able to fly.
Man’s nature is a desire to receive pleasure and in its yang avoid pain. But it is our ability to endure the pain, break from the shackles of our fears and push towards the light that thrusts us forward, emerging changed, transformed into something new. Our transformation is not visible on the outside it is internal….eternal.
At the end of this process you wouldn't be able to return to the caterpillar form even if you tried. It serves as a base of who we have become, a faint shadow of our past self, and the essence of our being. But after the struggle and its transformative effect you become something new unrecognizable to the fore. This quest, this seeking whether thrust upon us or chosen bears its fruit.