My PhD advisor's PhD advisor, who was quite a guru in the ecological world, used to asking his students to find connections between totally irrelevant topics. The idea was to train the students to think beyond their own academic boundary.
Butterfly and a big international move seem to be unrelated as well. Here is the connection: I'm in middle of a chaos of moving to Australia, and I feel rather butterfly-ish these days.
Why chaotic? Because I'm also wrapping up my PhD, which means turning in dissertation and defense, to say the very least, while preparing my move.
If any of the two tasks is a severe thunderstorm, then the combination probably equals to a hurricane.
No wonder this morning I found my living room (aka, my packing field) like a hurricane aftermath. I rolled my eyes, sighed, went back to bed, and started drafting my ad. for selling my dear Lucy, a car that has been almost like a friend for almost three years. I can only prey to find her a good home in less then a month...
I started to feel butterfly-ish again in my stomach when reading all the tips on how to sell used cars. This is much more complex than I imagined.
But I felt a lot better by dinner time--I decided to treat myself with flowers and a lobster (I'm mostly a herbivore but I love seafood). After dinner I even cleared up my living room, well, a little, and got two more boxes packed.
They joined the other five boxes sitting at where my dinner set used to be (I gave the set and other furniture to a friend, whose home completely burned down a while ago). I made up my mind: from now on I will look at these boxes often as they're a symbol of order in my chaotic life.
Actually according to MM, someday somehow all the mess/chaos will be packed into some boxes. He is trustworthy because he has been through so many moves, including three times moving in and out of the USA across continents! I do trust him in theory.
Actually MM even offered his own butterfly theory of moving. He claimed I was in middle of an ugly/messy stage of caterpillar, which would turn into a beautiful/tidy butterfly given time and patience.
Now it's bed time. After saying good night to the boxes, I think I started to trust MM's theory in practice. Still feel slightly bufferflyish, in a good way though. As I realize it is all part of the pain for change, for the better.
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