Stickers Butterfly Quotes

And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She thought of Betty and her stupid bumper sticker, and the child who had been so frightened that Halima Butterfly had told her about, and yet to tell any of this right now to Betty, who was genuinely suffering—as Olive had suffered—seemed cruel, and she kept silent.

Being alive is like being a very bad time traveler. One second per second, and yet somehow you still get where you’re going too late, or too early, and the planet isn’t where it should be because you forgot to calculate for that even though it was extremely important and you left notes by the door to remind yourself, and the butterfly you stepped on when you were eight became a hurricane of everything you ever lost in your forties, and whatever wisdom you tried to pack with you has always gotten lost in transit, arriving, covered in festive stickers, a hundred years after you died.

After we left Utah, when I became a life coach, I would see hundreds of clients through hundreds of “deaths.” I’d go through a few more iterations myself, and I’m sure there are more coming before the Big One. It’s always terrifying. It always hurts. It always brings up that familiar passel of awful sensations: the burn of anger, the horrible ache of loss, the sense of the ground falling away under my feet. But once you know what to expect, there’s a kind of calm that comes with the territory. Here we go again, I think, and surrender to the Void, clinging to the bumper-sticker wisdom that “what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” I’m still mostly caterpillar, but each metamorphosis is informed by the last. Life changes, relationships change, bodies change, beliefs change. Buddha’s “noble truth” of impermanence is the only permanent thing in human existence. Once you’re okay with that, dying—even with all the pain—doesn’t seem as bad as you thought it was.