A Story of Struggle

“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.” ~ William Goldman

I like stories of struggle. Not because I enjoy struggling or seeing other people struggle, but because there is a strength of character and wisdom earned from struggle that could never be honed by anything else. Today, I’m sharing with you one of my favorite stories about struggle, one I always call to mind when things get tough and I need to be reminded that there is purpose even in difficulty.

This story is about a man and an emperor moth. There are many variations and attributions of this story, but it seems to be mainly attributed to British naturalist and biologist Alfred Russel Wallace. I paraphrased a version of it below:

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Image by David Evans via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

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The story has it that Wallace once found a cocoon of an emperor moth. He saw that there was a narrow opening in the cocoon, through which the moth was attempting to emerge. So he sat for several hours watching it, eagerly anticipating the moment the moth would finally escape its cocoon, spread its majestic wings, and fly free.

After a long while, though, the moth still hadn’t escaped its cocoon. In fact, it appeared as though it was stuck; it had stopped making any progress on its way out. Wanting to help the moth out, Wallace took a blade and slit the rest of the cocoon open.

The moth emerged easily, but its body was swollen and its wings wrinkled. Wallace continued to wait hopefully, expecting the moth’s body to contract in time and its wings to expand once it recovered from the ordeal. But those never happened. The moth was reduced to creeping about on its swollen belly, its wings never developing any more than the shriveled sheets that they were. It soon died, never having tasted the glory of flight and the life it was meant to live.

Wallace realized that the moth’s struggle to ease out of that narrow opening in its cocoon turned out to be a necessary process for growth. It was nature’s way of forcing the fluid from the moth’s body into its wings, so that its wings would develop the size and strength it needed for flight. Because the moth was prematurely freed from its struggle through the small opening, there was no force to squeeze the fluid into those wings. The moth may have thus gotten out of its cocoon easily, but the price was spending the rest of its short life crawling on its belly and never realizing its full potential.

The struggle was painful to watch, and probably even more painful to experience, but it was nonetheless necessary if true freedom and flight were to be possible.

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Image by Ilia Ustyantsev via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

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What are your thoughts about this story? Have you ever tried “cutting the cocoons” of others, only to see later on that what you’ve done—though well-meaning—has crippled them from true growth? Or have you yourself ever cut your own cocoon, or asked someone to do it for you, only to turn out with crippled wings and unable to take flight?

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That’s just some food for thought for us all this Sunday. Also, taking this moment to let y’all know I’ll be on a blogging break for the rest of this month, and the next. Be back this July. Toodles! 🙂

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