The Violence of Beautiful Things

I'm standing in my front yard in Montecito, holding a mason jar with a chrysalis hanging inside. It's early morning, and I notice something different.

The chrysalis is moving.

Not swaying. Moving. Shaking like something is fighting to escape from inside.

Which, of course, is exactly what's happening.

The Jade Pendant That Changed Everything

Ten years ago, a guy here in Santa Barbara gave my wife Kymberlee a chrysalis. I'd never seen one up close. It looked like a little jade pendant with beautiful gold specs around the top.

"It's not jewelry," she told me. "It's life, waiting."

We got hooked on raising monarchs. Planted milkweed throughout our enclosed front yard because that's what the caterpillars eat. And boy, do they eat - a single caterpillar can consume thirty to forty leaves a day.

Eventually, we had twenty or thirty chrysalises at any given time, hanging from orchids, attached to fences, dangling from plants that had nothing to do with milkweed. The caterpillars would wander when ready to transform, looking for the perfect spot to hang and change.

We'd carefully move each chrysalis into a mason jar and wait for the metamorphosis.

But here's what no sixth-grade science class ever told me: the transformation is violent.

The Struggle IS the System

I watched that chrysalis shake harder and harder. At first gentle, then urgent, then frantic. The entire structure convulsed, as if desperate to break free.

What I learned later: this isn't random thrashing. The butterfly inside uses hydraulic pressure, pumping fluids through its body to push against the chrysalis shell. Over and over, targeting predetermined weak points in the casing.

The shaking gets more intense. Faster. More desperate-looking.

Then, in seconds, the shell splits and the butterfly breaks free.

Here's what changed everything for me: if you help a butterfly out of its chrysalis, it will die.

Or at best, never fly.

The physical exertion of breaking free develops the strength needed to pump fluid into wings and expand them properly. Remove the struggle, and you don't get a butterfly. You get something beautiful that can't function.

I stood there watching this newly emerged butterfly hang wet and crumpled, slowly expanding its wings, and realized I'd been thinking about transformation completely wrong.

The Lamaze Lesson That Lasted 53 Years

This takes me back to when I was nineteen, sitting in the first Lamaze class ever offered in Santa Barbara. My son was about to be born, and we'd decided on natural childbirth.

The instructor looked at all us nervous parents-to-be and said something I've never forgotten:

"This is going to be hard. It's going to hurt. I'm going to teach you everything that will happen, so there are no surprises. Fear comes from the unknown. If you know what to expect, when to expect it, and why each stage matters, you can handle any amount of pain."

She didn't promise to make birth easier. She promised to make it known.

That lesson has served me for five decades. Every time I feel fear, I ask myself: Am I afraid of the difficulty, or am I afraid because I don't know what's coming?

Usually, it's the unknown that terrifies us, not the struggle itself.

The New York Client Who Wouldn't Rock the Boat

I'm in a Manhattan office, staring at a large butterfly painting behind my client's desk. She's the Chief Learning Officer for an organization that's bleeding money due to constant turnover. Millions are lost every year.

I point to the painting. "Do you know how that butterfly got there?"

She smiles. "Caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly.

"

"True. But do you know about the one moment no one talks about? The violent part?"

I tell her how the chrysalis shakes, convulses, nearly tears itself apart, how the butterfly builds the strength to live by breaking free. And how, if you help, it dies.

Silence.

Then she says quietly, "I don't think my people have the willpower to go through that."

And there it was. The truth. The Chief Learning Officer wasn't afraid of turnover. She was afraid of learning. She'd rather accept slow death than risk watching her people shake their way into strength.

The Improv Rule That Explains Everything

In improv comedy, there's a cardinal rule: you're not allowed to "fix" the scene. The moment someone resolves the tension or smooths over the conflict, the scene dies. And with it, the comedy.

The human condition is inherently comedic - marked by mistakes, misunderstandings, and fumbling through unprepared situations. That's where magic happens.

But our instinct is to step in and fix it. Mak