Changing Like Frogs and Butterflies

What does it take to change? I suppose it depends on how big of a change we're talking about. Minor changes, like growing, seem to happen automatically. As long as one is alive, one is probably growing, changing in size over time. This sort of change is so easy, it seems almost inevitable. Yet, there are more drastic changes we can observe in the natural world, particularly those of frogs and butterflies.

Frogs changing into tadpoles take more than mere growing. As the tadpoles become larger, they also have to grow legs and adapt to breathing air and catching food with their tongues. The tadpole's whole physiology, lifestyle, and even environment (if one considers Near Water and Underwater to be different environments) change as they grow. Biologically, they are still the same creature, and the frog may even remember their life as a tadpole, but the change from a tadpole to a frog is certainly a dramatic one.

Yet, more dramatic still is the change from a caterpillar to a butterfly. If what I've heard is true, a caterpillar effectively dissolves their body once they had formed the chrysalis. That dissolved caterpillar goop eventually forms the body of the butterfly, but the two seem like different creatures, down to having different DNA, if I heard correctly. In this case, it's not that the caterpillar becomes a butterfly; it's that the butterfly consumes the caterpillar, like an embryo consumes a yolk in an egg.

Certainly, our personal changes don't all need to be as drastic as all that. Often, we can get away with milder transformations, like growing bigger, and perhaps even growing additional limbs, figuratively speaking. We naturally need to overcome faults and weaknesses. We may even try out a new medium of art or pick up a new skill. We may even change our lifestyle and/or environment, if we feel that's necessary. But changes any more drastic than that are rare. We certainly don't often break ourselves down to our base parts and form new creatures out of the pieces that were once us. I'm not sure we would even still be ourselves if we did that.

Following the Gospel path requires change. We need to grow and improve, lose vices and gain skills. All this, at most, constitutes the kinds of changes tadpoles make to become frogs. Only in the most drastic situations is it necessary for a creature to change as much as a caterpillar does. But, to answer my original question of how much change is required, I suppose it depends on the situation. Often, given enough time, gradual changes are enough, as we gradually grow into better people over time. In some cases, it may be necessary to gain or lose certain traits, as tadpoles gain legs and lose their tails. Ultimately, we will all transform, from mortal creatures to immortal creatures, in a transformation that could be compared to that of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. Taken as a whole, the changes we undergo between birth and eternity could certainly be considered as drastic as that of a butterfly, but within one's mortal lifetime, one's changes are, at most, more like that of a frog.

So, what does it take to change? That depends entirely on how big of a change we're making. Eventually, we will all change like butterflies. In the meantime, we can expect that we will only really need to change like frogs.