Beautiful things can come from unpromising beginnings

“During a biology class on metamorphosis, a teacher showed her class a series of pictures. The first was of a caterpillar. The next was of the caterpillar forming a chrysalis. The last was of a beautiful monarch butterfly emerging from its cocoon. One student was so impressed by this that he wrote in his notebook: ‘beautiful things can come from unpromising beginnings.” – Jen Defulimakis, Collected Writings

Do you agree that “beautiful things can come from unpromising beginnings?”

The eastern spiritual undercurrent uses the symbol of a ‘Lotus’ in almost every wake of its practices. The enlightened Buddha is portrayed sitting on a lotus, the blossomed consciousness of an individual is termed as ‘Sahasrar’ – the thousand petal lotus. The lotus grows amidst mud but is not adulterated by it. The most fragile and vivid of the entities often originate from an unpromising beginning but often surpass even the highest of the summits!

Dr. Abdul Kalam, a great Indian scientist, has in his autobiography, ‘The wings of fire’, mentioned the toils that he has had to face. Poverty stricken and uneducated family is from where the exceptionally talented man was born – and birth is more or less an erratic accident! An unmatched intellect and a down to earth personality fits his description, even though his background had not even an iota of the grandeur that he later developed.

A body part unused becomes unusable. Same analogy can be extrapolated to the abstract psychological muscles. Adversities are those little challenges that strengthen us. Swami Vivekananda termed the world as a ‘Spiritual gym.’ A river that stops to flow sooner or later will become atrophied. Hence life must be an incessant flow and a flow can exist only if there is a disparity – a dip and a peak! It needs no further clarification to digest the fact that the most promising things must have arisen from the meaning – for that is the eternal law.

Can there be dark without light, or sweet without the acrimonious? The seemingly apparent paradoxes at its core are only the complements of one another. The very definition of good cannot have any value if there was no evil! Good thrives on evil and vice-versa! The world is the most bemusing of the jigsaw puzzles! The unpromising beginnings and the promising outcomes are actually not separate as we imagine them to be!

The human mind is beyond the power of articulation categorical. It will not accept anything in its organic unity, it has to have the factions of the promising and the unpromising. But eternal life has no obligations whatsoever to be fulfilled; everything complements, abets and helps the other rise, so it should not be astound if promising things bloom out of unpromising!