Positive Focus Sunday - Change Takes Time!

The past few weeks I seem to be taking life lessons from a caterpillar. 

Actually, the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland has always intrigued me. So it's probably understandable I have been 'stalking' the caterpillars, observing them changing from a fat, multi-footed, striped caterpillar to a brilliant orange and black butterfly. 

One thought which has been running around in my mind is how 'change', especially change which changes you life, takes time. It's not something which happens overnight.

A monarch from hatching as a caterpillar to dying as a butterfly takes about 6 weeks. So if we take those weeks and make each week a decade, then from caterpillar to emerging as a butterfly takes 40 years. The last 20 years, it's a butterfly. 

I think we get caught up in saying we are going to change this or that in our lives and expect  - 'poof' - it happens. 

During the time in the chrysalis, depending on outside forces, like temperature, it takes a caterpillar 7 to 17 days to emerge. That would be 10-20 years in caterpillar-to-butterfly math. Some changes happen faster than others. And like life, some changes, no matter how much we want them to happen, don't. That butterfly never emerges. 

But change, I have found, especially major changes, take time. It's not about making a decision to change and it happens the next day and we go on with the new us. Much like a butterfly, we have to make the effort to change and then apply ourselves to the morphing into the person we want to become. 

Realizing this, it makes it more understandable why we get frustrated and give up. We are expecting that new life to happen overnight. And it can't. We have to try and work at it. 

I know I have changed over the years. I think we all do. I still waiting to emerge in my full 'butterfly' mode.