What a Butterfly Taught Me About Rest
As a kid, I measured a good day by how much I could accomplish in the day. Before I had my stroke, I was the kind of person who liked to be moving. I grew up believing that slowing down and not accomplishing my daily tasks, was not an option . Being a military brat probably had a small part in my thinking 😊 As an adult, I worked. I made plans, I and most importantly, I made sure that my family was taken care of…
Then life taught me that sometimes slowing down was no longer a choice.
I had a stroke when I was 30 and it changed my life. What was once automatic required more time, more thought, and more patience…something I did not have much of to begin with. My body had its own pace now, whether I liked it or not. For a long time, I think I saw slowing down as something that had been taken from me. I wanted to move faster, recover faster, do more, need less help, and get back to the person I remembered being.
Years later, I am still learning that lesson in different ways.
And somehow, a butterfly on a tree branch became a funny little reminder of it.
There is something almost comical about watching a butterfly simply exist. A butterfly does not seem particularly concerned with whether it has been productive enough that day. It does not appear to feel guilty for sitting still. It finds a comfortable place, tucks itself in, and rests because, apparently, resting is what needs to happen next.
Meanwhile, I sit down for five minutes and immediately start thinking about everything I should be doing.
Watching that butterfly made me think about how strange it is that we sometimes treat rest as something we have to earn. We give ourselves permission to stop only after everything is finished. But everything is never finished. There will always be another load of laundry, another email, another project, another errand, another thing that could be done.
Maybe rest was never supposed to be the reward at the end of all of that.
Maybe it is simply part of living.
That has been difficult for me to accept, especially because slowing down can feel different when your body has already forced you to give up some of the speed and independence you once had. Rest can feel less peaceful when you did not choose the limitations that forced you to rest.
But I am beginning to see a difference between being forced to stop and giving myself permission to rest.
One feels like something has been taken away. The other feels like kindness.
The butterfly on the tree branch did not teach me an enormous life-changing secret. It taught me something much smaller. It made me stop for a moment. It made me smile. And it reminded me that not every meaningful moment has to involve doing something.
Sometimes you can just sit.
Sometimes you can watch the world for a while.
Sometimes your body can be tired without needing an apology.
And sometimes slowing down allows you to notice things you would have walked right past before.
I am still not particularly good at resting or asking for help.. There is still a part of me that wants to keep moving, keep accomplishing, keep proving that I can do things for myself. Maybe there always will be.
But I am trying to learn that rest does not erase who I am. Slowing down does not mean I have stopped moving forward. And taking care of myself is not the same thing as giving up. Resting, I’ve realized, has given my body time to recover.
So maybe that was the year I learned to slow down—or, more accurately, the year I finally began learning how to do it in ways that work for me.
And of all the people who could have reminded me, it turns out one of my teachers had wings, with every ability to fly away and leave, but chose that it had nowhere else it needed to be, but that tree branch.