Living the life cycle of butterfly in a day

One of my favorite game in my childhood days was to run behind those colorful butterflies in the small garden in our backyard.It has always been an enigmatic , pleasure filled , exhilarating experience , the sense of joy and freedom.It was recently when i visited the butterfly park in Bannerghatta national park(Bangalore) the same pleasure was recreated.

This time thanks to my canon S5IS camera and hardship with which i was trying to take picture of butterflies,the guard there took pity on me and i was lucky to have got an opportunity to see the entire life stage of the butterfly in the laboratory there.It has also taught me an invaluable lesson for life. so i would like to share the details of the life cycle of butterfly(with pictures) along with my perspective of the cycle as i find it very similar to the mental lifecycle of us human beings.

Butterflies belong to the group insecta and reproduce by laying eggs , And there is a high probability that you will pass off the eggs without even noticing it.

Eggs of butterfly 1

Then comes the larvae/catterpillar stage. In the initial stages it supposedly sheds its skin several times before growing into an adult. This information forced me to draw a parallel of the learn/unlearn cycle that we go through, How many times do we shed our ignorance and build a new layer of fresh knowledge.This is a beautiful stage of growth is what i think.Here are 2 pictures of larvae of 2 different types of butterflies sorry that i forgot the name though.

Larvae of a butterfly

Larvae of butterfly 1

Pupa stage is the true testing stage in the butterfly life cycle, it is a stage where it builds a cocoon around itself.In the natural scenario it also has the responsibility to camouflage to protect itself from predators.But the interesting phase is the end , where it has to struggle its way out , it is this struggle which gushes the blood into its wings from its body and brings out the beautiful butterfly out.Once we learn/pursue what we believe in it is the assimilation and the introspection that makes the learning worthwhile. There might be struggle but the end result is always an enlightened mind and success.
pupa of butterfly 1
Then finally as the result of all these hardships comes the butterfly colorful and beautiful all set to explore the world , fluttering its wings without any rest jumping from flower to flower as though to make the fullest of its short 7 day life and relieve itself of the lethargy of staying dormant for so long .I could relate this to the "ah ha" minute that follows after solving a tough problem or anything that you can relate to .. which may be shortlived but unforgettable.

Butterfly 1

With this completes the butterfly lifecycle and my walk in the butterfly garden. Well i was thoroughly rejuventaed after this expedition, looking forward for more of these..

Race called Life

I am not saying anything new in this blog , but posing a question which we tend to ignore even when we know the answer.

There is an African proverb that reads

Every morning in Africa ,a gazelle wakes up

It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed

Every morning a lion wakes up,

It knows it must out run the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle When the sun comes up you better start running.

I am pretty sure that atleast 9 of 10 of us will be following this proverb day in and day out.

But if you try to introspect do you know what you are running after ? When the lion knows what it is after and gazelle knows what it is running from I'm pretty sure that 7 / 10 of us will not know for/from what we are running.

It so happens that , when we start running we tend to forget what our real ideals and morals were , probably we would have already crossed what we were after even without noticing it in the wake of this run.

Infact I was intrigued by the fact that the rate at which heart ailments among the mid 30 is increasing at alarming rate ,that shows the pressure or stress that we bring upon ourselves .In fact my neck pain which turned out to be something minor was a sort of wake up call i must say.

No I'm not propagating communism saying that every body should remain satisfied with whatever one has and it does not matter if you are poor or miserable as long as everybody else is in the same state.. in fact I'm a hard core ayn rand fan promoting capitalism.

At the same time I want to remind myself and whosoever is reading my blog that probably while running we are prone to taking on every crap because we don't have patience or time to think whether it is good or bad.

writing this I remember a colleague of mine who told that do what you want to do today because twenty years down the lane sitting in your balcony you should not regret about what you did not do today. yes it makes a lot of sense and it goes by principle that if you dont have time to do what you want to do then probably you have not understood your priorities well.

When it not possible to halt it is always ok to slow down , do you remember the details of things around you when you hurried ? or when you took things slow ?. I guess when you slow down you do things better ok now I better stop writing more ,this is more of a remainder to myself to introspect what and why I'm running and re-prioritize if needed.

What are you waiting for put on your thinking cap?