Last time, I shared a story from my childhood about playing by becoming a butterfly.
More than 25 years later, something happened that brought that memory back to me in a completely unexpected way.
At the time, I was working as a nurse at a day-care center for older adults.
One day, I was in the van that was picking up the people who came to the center.
For some reason, the radio was on that day. It normally wasn't.
I remember thinking, Oh, the radio is on today. That's unusual.
That was about it. It was simply playing in the background, and I wasn't really listening at all.
Then, from the radio, I heard these words:
“This is known as the Dream of the Butterfly, and the butterfly is said to be a symbol of the soul.”
Those words suddenly came into me with a powerful, almost overwhelming impact.
In that very moment, the memory of becoming a butterfly and playing that way as a child came rushing back.
And deep inside, something suddenly made sense.
I realized that when I had casually played at being a butterfly as a child, perhaps I had been moving beyond the surface-level self called “Sacchan” and returning to a deeper part of my consciousness—to who I truly was.
And perhaps, at the same time, I was reconnecting with this present-day “Sacchan,” this body I now inhabit, as if to remind myself:
This is me here, for now.
The fact that I was working as a nurse there.
That I happened to be riding in that particular van.
That the radio, which was normally never on, happened to be playing that day.
And that, at that very moment, I happened to hear words that would deepen my understanding of something that had happened more than 25 years earlier.
There was something so precise about it.
Something that felt impossible to describe in words.
In that moment, I could feel this vast expanse of time and space unfolding with not a single detail out of place.
I wondered,
What exactly were they talking about on the radio that day?
Were they talking about someone who had dreamed of becoming a butterfly?
So I looked it up and discovered that the program had been talking about Zhuangzi's Dream of the Butterfly.
It is a story that goes something like this:
One day, Zhuangzi fell asleep and dreamed that he was a butterfly.
In his dream, he fluttered happily around a garden, completely forgetting that he was a human being. He simply enjoyed being a butterfly, fully immersed in its life.
Then he suddenly woke up and found himself back as Zhuangzi, a human being.
But the dream had felt so real that he became confused.
Had I, a human being, just dreamed that I was a butterfly? Or am I actually a butterfly dreaming that I am a human being?
When I first learned this story, I was deeply moved.
It felt as though it was a symbol of the very game I had played as a child.
Perhaps there are no coincidences in this world.
Perhaps everything is unfolding with perfect precision, with a single consciousness expressing itself through all that appears before us.
This visible world is one vast story.
And from that point on, throughout my life, there would be many more moments when this sense of inevitability would reveal itself to me.:::