Turn & Face the Strange

[ . . .] What the caterpillar calls the end,
The rest of the world calls a butterfly.
~ Laozi
Whereas the End Is a New Beginning
I’m sure we’ve all had days when it seemed like the world was ending. Those days when everything just goes wrong, every decision you make turns into disaster and everything you do backfires. Maybe even worse than this, you may have lost your job at some point, your source of income, through no fault of your own; your whole world collapsed and no solutions seemed forthcoming.
In catastrophic situations like loosing your livelihood and being unsure what the future might bring, reflecting on Laozi’s poetic saying about the caterpillar and the butterfly might ease your mind and put things in perspective. I recall two distinct times in my own life during which the world seemed to be unravelling, but in the end those situations turned out to be mere caterpillars which transformed into beautiful butterflies.
The first time was when I finished business school in 1992, three year’s I’d wasted away at that college. I felt totally disillusioned by having learnt outdated economic theories taught by some seriously incompetent teachers. I found that, at the start of my career, the only thing I knew was what I did not want to do! It was not a good start.
Then came the caterpillar’s cocoon. Back in those days, the Netherlands still had an army of conscripts. I’d been given postponement for military service because I was studying but, now that I had finished my studies, I would have to join the army. It turned out to be a beautiful butterfly. I was a conscripted soldier for nine months and then signed up as a professional Non-Commissioned Officer for another eighth years; I had the time of my life.
The second time my world seemed to collapse was a decade later in 2002. I had just lost my job as an airline operations officer in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and didn’t know what to do next. My life wasn’t really that desperate, I had a comfortable unemployment allowance and some savings in the bank, but I was so bored. Only six months earlier I had come back home from an exciting trip around the world with no money, no job and no plans. I then managed to find a job within weeks of my return and my life had quickly become a boring routine.
This time I created my own cocoon. I first went to Africa to ‘think’ and a couple of months later I was of to South-East Asia to do some more ‘thinking’. When I was in Laos, I was offered a job as an ESL teacher. Without much hesitation I accepted the offer and, once again, what seemed the end became a new beginning.
The lesson of this saying is an easy one: when you find yourself in what seems a desperate situation, make a radical change and things will turn out fine.
[T]here you are.