Fluttering Butterflies.....

My dear Bhargavi
Among the many curses that befell Adam when he succumbed to the pestering of Eve and laid his hands on the Forbidden Fruit was that his psyche should be tortured by Time. That’s how we have come to be anxious about our future, regretful of our past and clueless about our present. The passage of time leaves its strong foot-prints in the deep furrows on our foreheads. Have you ever seen an elephant or any other living being carrying such furrows on their foreheads?

The Sixth Sense on which humans pride themselves is an asset only for a person of great wisdom. In all others, it is a great liability. It creates an awful fear of the unknown in us making our very existence untenable. The fluttering butterfly may be perched on a branch of a tree barely few inches away from a predator with a salivating mouth but the butterfly continues with its joyful existence unaware that death is staring at it. But the humans worry themselves sick about known and unknown dangers. Their smiles get wiped out at the very thought of some unsavory possibility. The very sight of an L or I, as Mindian calls them, makes us scream at a decibel level greater than the primordial Big Bang!

The fluttering butterflies seem to justify the rationale behind the Epicurean philosophy of ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die’. There is a subtle difference though. The epicureans are aware of their perishable nature and so theirs is a conscious decision to follow an epicurean life style. But the butterflies are not aware of their perishable nature and that contributes to their joyful disposition. The fluttering butterflies have a strong message for us but being weighed down by our own concerns, we fail to notice it.

A great post Bhargavi. A fluttering butterfly is a nice creature to emulate. For that, we may just need to step outside of ourselves and become an Alice in Wonderland!
Sri