Why We Become

We love a butterfly. We rarely think about the cocoon.

Maya Angelou once wrote,

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

We admire the wings. We celebrate the transformation.

But we seldom stop to consider the dark work that came before it.

The work of becoming happens in the dark, where the caterpillar comes apart completely before it comes back together as something new. That part is not gentle. And the butterfly makes the journey anyway.

Which leaves a question I keep returning to: why? Why would any living thing choose the hard, disassembling middle? Is it vanity — I want to be beautiful? To be admired? Seen? I don't think so. The why runs deeper than that alone.

A caterpillar can only inch along a single leaf, one small bite at a time. A butterfly crosses whole meadows. It carries pollen from flower to flower and makes fruit, and seed, and the next generation of plants possible. The transformation is about reach — about being able to give far more than the old body ever could. The caterpillar becomes so it can have an impact it could never have reached before. Becoming is what lets it give.

I think that is true of us, too.

Somewhere along the way, we began treating growth as a form of self-optimization. Nature suggests something different. Living things become not simply to improve themselves, but to increase what they can contribute. Yes, becoming is deeply personal; we grow more capable, more whole, more ourselves, and that matters. But it was never only about us. Becoming is an act of nature that reaches past the self. We grow, and in growing we become able to serve more, reach further, and hold more of what the people around us need. The self and the world grow together. Both are true at once.

Here is what the butterfly taught me about the hard part. Real growth asks you to come apart a little before you come back together, and that stretch is uncomfortable every time. What keeps you steady there is your why. When you know what your becoming is for — what it will make possible, and for whom — the discomfort stops being a reason to quit. It becomes the price of something worth having. Anchor to your why, and let it be both the catalyst that begins the change and the determination that carries you through the middle.

And when you come through, pause and really see what becoming makes possible. The creature that once inched along one leaf now pollinates a field. That is a different order of contribution — so far beyond the starting point that it is hard to believe it is the same being. What we become determines what we can offer. Growth is where the real work begins.

None of this is passive. Becoming is a choice, made and remade, and agency is its currency. Even waiting is a choice — and waiting quietly hands the outcome to someone else. To become is to keep choosing to grow, on purpose, toward something larger than yourself.

And then, beauty. This is the gift I didn't expect. When you make the journey for a reason bigger than yourself, beauty comes anyway — a deep, earned beauty, the glorious by-product of a becoming done for the right why. The butterfly becomes to give. The beauty simply arrives.

I spend my working life inside organizations, and the same truth holds there. Organizations become, or they stall. The real work of a leader is to build the capacity to become — the conditions under which people and the whole institution keep growing toward the mission, and the shared why that steadies everyone through the hard parts. When an organization invests in becoming, it grows more capable, and it gains the ability to serve more of the people it exists for. The growth turns inward and outward at once.

Capacity is what becoming leaves behind.

Capacity is what enables contribution.

We are always becoming. That part is settled; it is simply what living things do. The only questions left are these: Toward what? For whom? And will we choose our becoming — or simply let it happen to us?

- DeEtta

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