Before the Wings Dry

On pace, presence, and the practice of becoming.

Every spring, my wife orders the butterfly kit.
A clear plastic cup arrives in the mail, filled with caterpillars and a layer of food at the bottom. They eat. They grow. And after a few days, they crawl to the top of the cup, attach themselves to the lid, and hang there — still, suspended, wrapped in the mysterious safety of a chrysalis.

We move the lid into the little mesh enclosure and wait. And then, like clockwork, one by one, they emerge. Their wings wet and heavy. Not yet ready for flight.

There’s something about that moment that stops me every year — that fragile pause between emergence and flight. They’ve become what they were meant to be, but they’re not yet capable of being it. They just hang there, wings soft and dripping with the memory of confinement, while the air around them begins to do its quiet work of drying.

And all around them, others are at different stages of becoming.
Some still sealed in their cocoons. Some testing the air. Some already lifting into motion.

It’s beautiful — and a little disorienting — to witness that contrast.

Because this is how becoming works in our lives too.
We emerge at different times, in different ways, and at different paces. Some of us are drying our wings while others are already in the air. Some of us are still learning to trust that what we’ve become is enough to take flight.

And that’s where the human challenge begins.

When we witness someone else soaring while our own wings are still wet, it can be hard not to rush the process. We start to compare, to mimic, to mold our journey after someone else’s. We confuse adjacency for alignment. We watch others’ flight patterns and think that maybe, if we flap like them, we’ll reach the same heights.

But that’s not how emergence works.

The timing of your unfolding is not a mistake.

You’re reading the public reflection.
What follows moves from metaphor into practice — how this truth shows up in our leadership, our pace, and the way we build culture around becoming.

If this rhythm resonates, I’d love for you to join us in the ecosystem of becoming.