“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it’s forever.”

— Dr. Carl Sagan

I thought today I would defend the ego.  We hear so much about the evils of being egocentric or about needing to eradicate our egos in order to discover our oneness with other people and, indeed, with the entire universe.  Few people marveled at the universe more than Dr. Carl Sagan; and his perspective about our existence and the butterflies makes a pretty good case for our need for an ego.

We watch the butterfly, whose life cycle allows for only a day of living in their winged magnificence, and we think of how sad it is that they flutter for such a short time — barely enough to reproduce and die.  Butterfly time is far different from human time; and when we compare ourselves to them, we cannot help but feel more significant and more important than these beings who are gone in the blink of an eye.

Time is relative.  We live within a framework of our predictable life span and consider ninety years on Earth a good chunk of minutes in which to change our world.  That we feel this way is a tribute to our egos.  How else, within the framework of all of history, could we consider anything we might accomplish in this speck of time significant?

It is good to understand how impermanent we are.  It is recognizing this impermanence that motivates us to achieve whatever we can during our lifetime and not take a minute for granted; but it takes an ego — an expression of “I” — to allow us to think that our individual speck of a contribution might be significant in the continuing evolution of our world.  When we consider how small our lives are in the big picture of the life of the universe, it is good to know that we are more than our egos; but while we are here, it is our ego that allows us to feel important enough to consider our contributions worthwhile.  And I believe that they are.