My favourite piece in chess is the pawn. Why, you might ask, a pawn, when there are far more powerful, interesting pieces like the almighty queen, the elusive knight or the game-deciding king? The reason is because of the pawn’s potential. A pawn, upon reaching the back rank, can become any other piece in the game. It can start off the game as a most ordinary henchman, but 40 moves later, turn the tables as a game-winning queen. To me, that is beautiful.

My favourite moments in life are the ones that force change. Most of my life decisions are driven by a search for sights, conversations and ideas that make me go, “wait a second, let me reconsider that”. My hobby of reading gives me insights to new ideas, my career in medicine gives allows me unexpected conversations, and my practice of journalling allows me to reflect on these for change.

The frustrating thing is that change is difficult. We hope it will be as simple as taking the pawn off the board and replacing it with a queen, but it rarely is. Change often requires two processes: recognising a flaw in ourselves and initiating its necessary death. Both are immensely difficult to do.

For similar reasons as the pawn, the caterpillar is one of my favourite animals. Its transformation into a butterfly is extraordinarily beautiful, and unique in the animal kingdom. But the process of change in a caterpillar is far from easy. From The New York Times:

“It turns out that the inside of a cocoon is — at least by outside-of-a-cocoon standards — pretty bleak. Terrible things happen in there: a campaign of grisly desolation that would put most horror movies to shame. What a caterpillar is doing, in its self–imposed quarantine, is basically digesting itself. It is using enzymes to reduce its body to goo, turning itself into a soup of ex-caterpillar — a nearly formless sludge oozing around a couple of leftover essential organs (tracheal tubes, gut).

Only after this near-total self-annihilation can the new growth begin. Inside that gruesome mush are special clusters of cells called “imaginal discs,” which sounds like something from a Disney movie but which I have been assured is actual biology. Imaginal discs are basically the seeds of crucial butterfly structures: eyes, wings, genitalia and so on. These parts gorge themselves on the protein of the deconstructed caterpillar, growing exponentially, taking form, becoming real. That’s how you get a butterfly: out of the horrid meltdown of a modest caterpillar.”

Did you catch that last line? The origins of the beautiful butterfly are from the meltdown of a modest caterpillar.

I often wonder what goes through a caterpillar’s mind as it begins releasing enzymes to digest itself. Is it terrified at the pain it will endure? Does it consider dropping out halfway through its metamorphosis? Does it ever ask itself, “Who ever said I needed to be a butterfly? I’m damn happy being a caterpillar and will stay this way.”

But of course, we know that becoming a butterfly is the natural progression of a caterpillar’s life. A caterpillar deciding to not metamorphose is like a child deciding to not become an adult. Even though the change is difficult, causing a destruction of itself in the process, it must happen.

Change is difficult, but simultaneously necessary. It requires a painful dissolution of the old, and a slow rebuilding of the new. Yet like a pawn becoming a queen or a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly, the result is beautiful. And because of the effort required for change, its beauty is exponentially greater.