Be An Effing Butterfly
By Emily Katherine McLean
These are some almost alarmingly common ice-breaker questions: “What would you do if you knew this would be your last day on earth?” Or “If you only had a year to live, what would you hope to accomplish?” These questions always felt hypothetical and silly to me until recently…”Scuba-dive! Visit London! Start a non-profit! Write a play! Sing on American Idol! Tell everyone how much I love them!” My gut-reaction answers reflected the things that either a) I was too scared to try, or b) I thought maybe I’d eventually get around to in the very long life I was sure was ahead of me.
Pondering those questions is less hypothetical to me now, but not just because of my recent diagnosis.
In December of 2020, I lost a college friend and classmate to a tragic car accident. I think about Haley Sue often, and in some ways am still just as shocked and sad as when I first heard the news that she had passed. Fatal car accidents can happen to anyone. Life can vanish in an instant. Her passing was a wake-up call to that reality for me, but the life she lived changed me even more significantly than her death.
Haley was a cheerleader in every sense of the word. On and off the court, Haley was fearless in her love and enthusiasm for life. Every memory I have of her, she was fully present, taking risks, loving on and encouraging others, and dreaming big for herself and her friends. Haley Sue had no idea how many days she would live on this earth, but all who had the privilege of knowing her could see that she lived every day like it could be her last. She didn’t hold back, she didn’t wait until the “perfect time” to do or say what she felt was right. She just went for it. And she led others to start doing the same.
The truth is, I’m not the only one here whose days are numbered. The only difference between you and me right now is that I have a cancer diagnosis which prompted my doctors to give me a prognosis (which in my case is simply an educated guess based on a very small pool of case studies). We are all on the same trajectory of life ending in death. As a dear friend and mentor once told me in the words of Ram Dass, “We’re all just walking each other home.”
There are two ways to go with the brevity of life in mind:
We can live like a mouse, in total fear, becoming paralyzed with the idea that every moment needs to be monumental, special, meaningful, and good. We can get overwhelmed by the fear that the last thing we say or do with someone will not be enough. In some ways, there’s truth there…no amount of time or words will ever feel like enough because we were not made for this broken world. There’s a better life ahead. But when we lose sight of that, this world becomes a very crippling place to be.
We can live like a butterfly, in total freedom. We can move from moment to moment, flower to flower, soaking up the beauty and sunshine of the life we have. We can stop and smell the roses without worrying that we’ll never experience anything beautiful ever again. We can invite others to join us in our journey, and we can also find joy in our own sunny solitude. We can endure through the rain because we know it helps the flowers grow. We can trust that God will provide for us while we live and will eventually call us home when this sweet chapter of our life is over. We can let go of the notion that we need all the answers to life’s big questions. We can let God be God, and we can keep being butterflies.
So why would you keep being a mouse when you can be a f*cking butterfly?
A Note to Those Who Know Me:
Sometimes I feel like the people around me are living like only I am dying - giving me so much sweet time and attention that it can feel almost suffocating. Don’t get me wrong, I love receiving kindness just as much as the next person, but if you find yourself focusing in on the brevity of my life without thinking of the brevity of yours, you could end up living the mouse life and missing out on the beauty of being a butterfly. Because if you live like a butterfly, and I live like a butterfly, we can fly and soak up that beauty together while still enjoying our own personal journeys. Love you. Let’s fly!
