The Campbell Academy Blog

The Butterfly Paradox

Recently, I've been listening to Nick Butter's book 'Run Britain' about the guy (Nick Butters) who ran the coast of Britain in 2021 just after the second COVID lockdown.

Dom recommended it to me in our practice, and although I was a little bit reluctant to begin listening to it (although the author reads it himself, and I always love books that are read by the author), it develops into the most extraordinary story.

Just to be brief, Nick is an adventure ultra runner who has done some extraordinary challenges but, in April 2021, decided to run the coastline of Britain, attempting to run double marathons every day for 100 days to clock up over 5000 miles over Britain's coastline.

The story, the description, the journey are utterly extraordinary. You should give it a listen; it's available on Audible.

There are many nuggets, gems, and wonderful pieces in that book, but the bit that's sticking with me the most is the butterfly paradox (at least that's what I'm going to call it).

It's one of Nick Butter's ways of rationalizing the struggle and bearing in mind this is a guy who, after approximately 20 days of running, had a stress fracture in his left tibia and took two days off running and then continued to run another 4000 miles!

Butters explains that if you find a chrysalis about ready to hatch with a brand new butterfly and you incise a line through it to open it and allow the butterfly to be released, the butterfly dies.

The reason for that is that the final struggle for the butterfly to exit the chrysalis and push it apart is what gives its wings the strength to fly and survive.

Remove the struggle, remove the life.

That's quite an interesting concept, isn't it?

More and more we shy away from the struggle from the difficult, from the thing that we cannot cope with or the mountain that we cannot climb.

But of course, these are not separate things to life to be avoided; they are essential parts of life which allow us to grow and make us stronger and make us better and make us happier and make us much more able to cope with bigger struggles and bigger mountains.

I think I'm past the stage of being able to run Britain (I really wish I wasn't), but I refuse to be past the stage where I will not accept the struggle.