It was very windy here this evening, but it was so nice otherwise that I went out to sit on the bench outside my quad anyway.
While I was sitting there I watched a butterfly going about its short butterfly life, doing butterfly things and being tossed about by the wind.
As I was sitting there watching, it occurred to me that butterflies’ lives are so short that for this one its entire knowledge of the world will involve wind. As far as it knows, it has always been windy and it always will be. It could just as easily have come out of its cocoon on a day with no wind, and its image of the world would have been completely different. It never would have known what wind was, just as today it had no opportunity to know calm.
In the sweep of history our lives are really not all that much less ephemeral than the lives of butterflies. I know that butterflies and humans are different in that we have the ability to look back at history and see how some things change.
Still I wonder, what are the forces that toss us around and that seem to us as permanent and universal as the wind seemed to that butterfly? And like the butterfly emerging on the calm day, what are the things that are missing from our lives that we cannot even imagine?
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