Does the Butterfly Remember its Life as a Caterpillar?

:::reflections found in old friends:::

It is a curious thing, growing older. It happens slowly at first and then suddenly several decades pass. I am currently in Hội An, Vietnam, enjoying the holidays with my family and one of my oldest friends. And as we spend our brief time together here, catching up and sharing stories of our new lives, we are realizing how much we have grown over the years, how far we have come from those innocent days spent carelessly tramping about cornfields in our youth.

I often romanticize that it must have been easier for previous generations. As I am being reminded while conversing with my brother, his partner and my old “bestie”, nearly all my friends from the west are experiencing now some variation of consistent anxiety. Curiously, I know very few here in SouthEast Asia who I would say can relate to this rising phenomena. Why is my generation is so nervous all the time, so easily irritable and made uncomfortable? Is it merely due to the rising cost of groceries? Was it easier in my parents day? Can we learn something from observing life on other shores, in other times, from other points of reference?

Being that we are in Vietnam, many memories from my parents’ youth are now surfacing for them. When they were young, fears similar to what many of my American kin now feel, of various shades of impending doom seemed to then plague their minds as well. It has been touching in an odd way to listen to there old tales and discover common ground. Yes, it was easier to buy a home back then, but the insanity of empire was just as prevalent then as it is now. We are but the heirs of that insanity, and it is up to us to end the cycle.

We often don’t realize how much we have changed until we are met again with our past. I have not fully lived in The U.S. for over a decade now. Yet American empire is so pervasive in nearly all corners of the world, be it in the form of gross military presence, linguistic dominance, cultural influence, corporate power, etc. that I often feel nonetheless, still very much connected to the place of my origin. “The West” is everywhere. But as I spend these precious days in conversation with my family who is visiting me from the other side of the big pond, I find myself struggling to relate to them in many ways. Time, and the world, has changed me in ways I am only now beginning to notice and attempt to understand.

My humor is not what it use to be. Sarcasm, for example, seems to me now to be obnoxious and rude. Too much direct communication and “driver” energy, while it once impressed me, now seems off-putting. Many of the views I once held on to so tightly, views that seemed so noble and universally applicable, have over time softened and made me deeply reconsider “what is best”. Things I once considered reasonable now seems perversely bougie from the vantage point of my new life as a farmer in a so-called “developing” region. And in turn, things I once considered to be signs of poverty I now see as signals of Right Relation.

As I reflect over the fears my parents had growing up in a time of massive social upheaval, I am starting to notice more similarities between us. Yet so too are there very different realities that we are now forced to learn how to navigate. I shared with my family last night over a lovely, dare I say bougie, cheese spread (Vietnams French influence is still very much alive and well here), that I often feel as though I have not allowed myself enough opportunity to truly grow roots into my new surroundings. Yes, I am seeing the world differently merely from being here, this is an unavoidable blessing and curse offered to all who travel. Yet because of certain cultural privileges, and the fact that we live in a time where I can always thumb through social media whenever I get too homesick and instantly emotionally travel back home again, I have rarely fully allowed myself to delve deeply into here and now, always keeping a chunk of my soul elsewhere via the time machine in my pocket. What if I instead did what not long ago all travelers to far away lands had to do, and truly left everything behind?

The tone shifted from joyous to somber when I offered up this thought experiment. Modernity has us convinced we can always have our cake and eat it too. That we can be here and there, forever well-connected and safe. Not just some of the time, everywhere, instantly. But what if this obsession not only is false but it is preventing us from experiencing deeply the real growth our world so desperately now needs? What if, in order to genuinely transform we must truly, fully let go of who we once were?

When I am with old friends, I find myself subconsciously reverting to who I was when I was younger. But I am no longer now who I was then, so eventually it gets awkward. I can’t pretend to be the carefree playboy that once was (this is embarrassing as all hell to share) elected to be Homecoming King. The world has changed me, and although the changes have certainly resulted in shrouding me with an at times confusing and uncomfortable blanket of grief, and even though some of these changes I don’t always enjoy, I am nonetheless grateful for these changes and I can’t help but wonder, if I, a privileged expat, ten+ years into my new life in Asia, haven’t allowed this place to change me enough. What if I were to fully let go, like the caterpillar in the cocoon and surrendered completely to wildly new understandings? What if I showed the amount of courtesy to my new community that they have shown me? Everyone in the world learns to speak english, to wear t-shits, watch Hollywood movies and eat fast food. What if we could be so humble and return the favor?

I wonder.

Does the Butterfly remember its life as a caterpillar? Does the ocean remember its life as a drop of rain? Why do we feel so sad when we think about letting go? A cloud never dies after all, as the great Vietnamese monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh often said before he too transformed into something new. All things must pass. If the seed refused to be buried, the corn would never grow.

My parents are getting older. I can see that much of what they would like to do together while we are here we probably won’t be able to do. Our bodies change, our desires change. But so often we try desperately to hold on, yearning for a constancy rooted in nostalgia and overly romantic yearnings. I want to be fully here, and fully there. This seems to be a common dream in our post-modern fantasy, a world where few have ever truly been properly initiated into adulthood. Yet as I age and allow what I am able to to offer me deeper insight, it seems that genuine transformation requires full emersion, full surrender, full release and full faith.

My friend, no longer feeling in authentic alignment with a female’s body, now identifies as “they”. It has always seemed strange to me that such a change triggers so many. All men have non-men traits and all women have non-women traits. Indeed, all humans have non-human elements and non-humans carry in them human elements. Everything in life is fluid and ever-changing. We inter-are. Similar to my friend, I no longer can say that I fully identify with being “American”. To be sure, I have certain “American” particles, but so too am I now partly Thai, partly Nepali, partly Nicaraguan and all the other places I have lived and loved. I am all the books I have read, all the spices I have enjoyed in my curries and all the new time signatures that have heard that have slowly altered the groove from what I long ago danced to into another waltz altogether.

.

Breathing in, I know that I am living in a time of unprecedented transformation.

Breathing out, I allow all the memories of unprocessed anxieties to pass.

Breathing in, I know that what comes now will be nothing short of a miracle.

Breathing out, I re-member you. I do not forget you.

No, my dear friend, I will never abandon you.

I am in you and you are in me.

I release you to be so free.

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#maypeaceprevailonearth