From the Chrysalis
A few weeks ago, I taught a painting class at Wine & Design, the painting for the day was a butterfly landing on a flower with a little caterpillar on one of the leaves. I love teaching there part-time for many reasons, Meredith Brooks Scott has been building an incredibly welcoming business, all of my fellow artists there are kind and eager to help participants have a good time and I especially love getting paid to paint and hone my teaching skills.
Something I notice participants immediately want to do is to declare that they aren’t creative, don’t know what they're doing, or don’t think they can paint. As a life coach who preaches that creativity is an innate part of each of us, hearing someone say this is heartbreaking.
Have you ever heard the phrase “A beginner's mind has the best insights”? I find that is often the case with painting. The very thing people think is a weakness is in this case one of their greatest strengths. Truly you can’t do painting wrong and if you “don’t know how to paint” you won’t come at the painting the way someone who paints regularly does and often those who declare they can’t paint leave with the most unique and interesting pieces exactly because they are a beginner.
Every time I teach I look for a way to connect with the students, let them know I’m right there with them and not just going through the motions. After all, if you’re at Wine and Design you’re there to have fun! As we were painting this butterfly, I reminded the class that for a caterpillar to become a butterfly it doesn’t grow wings and antennas and just become a butterfly.
The caterpillar must completely dissolve itself aside from a small cluster of cells. It has to completely turn to mush within the chrysalis. It’s like that in painting and in life. Often we hit a hard patch, in the painting, it might look like mush, and it might to you the painter look horrible. This is what I call the messy middle.
I’ve observed recently with clients, entrepreneurial friends, and personally that many of us are going through steep challenges. We’re in that messy middle, we feel like mush. We feel like we’ll never get there and we don’t even know where there is.
This is where it’s helpful to remember that the caterpillar has to completely dissolve into that protein-rich mush because it is from that mush that cells begin to rapidly divide. In one Scientific American article I read, it said the mush might start at 50 cells and divide into over 50k cells to transform into this completely new creature. This new creature is a moth capable of making an airborne journey of 2500 miles or more.
Once a caterpillar has transformed into a butterfly, its work isn’t done. The butterfly has to break free from the chrysalis. That’s a lot of work, but if someone, let’s say a well-meaning human, were to try to “help” it break free when they saw it struggling to get out, that human would be actually dooming the caterpillar. The caterpillar needs the struggle to build its strengths and muscles to make the long migrational flights it faces ahead.
If you’re a beginner, if you're in the messy middle right now, it’s okay. In fact, it's probably wonderful. It means that you’re in the middle of a transformation. The other side will be beautiful and because of that there’s beauty in the struggle too.