ALLOW THE STRUGGLE

When you see someone struggling, our human instincts are to jump in and help them. Allowing someone to struggle enables that person to be awakened. To learn such beautiful and valuable lessons about life. The main one being, YOU are in control of YOUR life and only YOU can fix it.

I was told a beautiful story by my program counsellor during one of our youth mentoring sessions the other week about a butterfly.

The butterfly story goes;

There was a young boy who was enamoured by caterpillars. So, he found one and decided to keep it and look after it. The boy loved this caterpillar when one day it started to create a cocoon for itself and disappeared inside. The boy was so excited for the caterpillar to turn into a butterfly and see it come out and fly away.

Then, one day, the cocoon started to open and the butterfly began to emerge. The boy was so excited! The butterfly then started to struggle. It was stuck in the cocoon and throwing itself around, trying to get itself out. But it just couldn’t do it. The boy was getting very upset. Worried the butterfly wouldn’t be able to get out.

He watched the butterfly struggle and he thought enough was enough. So, the boy decided he had to help. The boy then cut the butterfly free out of the cocoon but then, the butterfly couldn’t fly. The butterfly had a swollen body and small shrivelled wings and the boy hoped the wings would dry out and the butterfly would fly away, but it didn’t.

The butterfly then spent the rest of its life crawling around unable to fly.

The boy then learnt that the butterfly actually needed to struggle in order to fly. During the struggle, the butterfly drains the fluid out of their body and into their wings, allowing them to grow and giving them the ability to fly away and live a happy life.

The boy’s good intentions actually hurt the butterfly.

Allow the struggle, allow the learnings and just be there for someone, don’t seek to fix anything.