Dance With Me [III]: I Believe in Butterflies

Have you ever felt butterflies? The fluttery sensation you get in your stomach before you step on stage, before a presentation, before an interview, the feeling you get when you come face to face with the person of your dreams.

My first “butterflies” experience was when I was about eight. It was my first dance performance. When I stood waiting in my wing to make my entrance, I felt a strange sensation - a fluttery feeling in my stomach.

It's the butterflies.

I willed them to go away but they stayed, fluttering their wings to the pitter-patter of my fast beating heart.

Then, the music started and something, almost a supernatural force took over. I entered a realm that I’d never known, and I saw, heard and felt only the energy that emanated from the bodies on the stage that I was part of. It was as if I was in a trance. So absorbed into the music, the rhythm and beat of the tapping and stomping of feet, the movement of the bodies was I that I only came to my senses when the music stopped and the applause came.

That was the awakening - the mysterious butterflies that takes you into an unknown, unexplained zone.

Throughout my adult life, I used the butterflies as my gauge. In work and in relationships, the butterflies told me whether or not I am steering towards the right realm. Logic can only give me the facts and figures but butterflies tell me how my soul feels.

I dropped out of business accounting when I was 17 even though it was considered an elite programme in one of the best tertiary institutions in town. Ledgers and balance sheets didn’t give me butterflies. But I found something better the year I turned 19 – my current profession and I love what I do - exploring angles and selling a story still gives me butterflies, even after so many years. I still get a high when I see the stories I’d pitched getting published, on TV, talked about on the internet. And I still feel the thrill when I see a person I’d profiled appearing in the pages of a magazine. I don’t need the fame myself because I feel like a million bucks when I see my hard work in the media.

Waking up one day to realize that “forever and ever” is hell of a long time and that the person whom I was engaged to did not give me butterflies was another awakening.

The mysterious butterflies can never be properly explained but I know that they are there as a barometer - they appear when my soul sings and soars with every tune that makes my heart beat and miraculously disappears when there is an eclipse.

Do you believe in butterflies?

I do.

And I think that the mysterious butterflies are there in all of us but it is up to the individual to recognize their existence - so that they can come to life.