What Inspires you? What the Smallest Wings Teach Us

I. The Smallest Beginnings

There is a creature, no bigger than a raindrop, painted in bold dots of crimson and black. We call them ladybugs. We call them lucky. We let them crawl across our fingers and whisper wishes as they fly away.

But we rarely ask: How did they get their wings?

We see only the final version—the polished, perfect, spotted beauty drifting on the summer wind. We do not see what came before. We do not see the waiting. We do not see the dark.

And perhaps that is why the ladybug has so much to teach us about life.

Because before the flight, there is always a fall. Before the color, there is always the grey. Before the becoming, there is always the breaking down.

II. The First Stage: Being Small in a Giant World

A ladybug begins as nothing more than a tiny, yellow egg, no larger than a pinhead, glued to the underside of a leaf. It is hidden. It is vulnerable. It is easy to miss.

From this egg hatches something unexpected. Not a tiny beetle. Not a miniature version of the beauty to come. Instead, it hatches into a larva—a small, alligator-like creature, spiky and strange, colored in muted greys and oranges with tiny bristles along its back.

It does not look like a promise. It looks like a mistake.

If you saw it crawling along a stem, you would not pick it up. You would not call it lucky. You would not whisper a wish. You would probably walk right past it, never knowing that inside this awkward, overlooked creature, a destiny is already stirring.

And is that not how we feel sometimes? Small. Strange. Overlooked. Crawling through our days while the world walks past, never seeing the wings we cannot yet feel.

For weeks, the larva does only one thing: it eats. It consumes hundreds of aphids, tiny pests that would otherwise destroy the plants around it. Without knowing it, without any applause, without anyone watching, it is already a protector. It is already making the world a little better, one small meal at a time.

It grows. It sheds its skin. It grows again.

It does not complain about the waiting. It does not ask when the beauty will arrive. It simply does what it was made to do, trusting that the story is not over yet.

III. The Darkest Hour: The Work You Cannot See

Then, one day, something shifts.

The larva stops. It attaches itself to a stem—a leaf, a fence post, anywhere stable—and hangs upside down. It curls into a tight comma shape, still as stone.

From the outside, it appears to be resting. Doing nothing. Surrendering.

But inside that small, still shell, a revolution is taking place.

This is the pupa stage. And it is not rest. It is not surrender. It is destruction and creation happening at the same time, in the same space, in the dark.

Inside that tiny shell, the old body is digesting itself. Breaking down. Every cell that once made it a crawling larva dissolves into a kind of living soup. If you could look inside, you would see chaos. You would see the end of everything it once was.

But you would also see the beginning.

From that soup, something entirely new is being assembled. Legs. Eyes. Antennae. And wings—delicate, folded, waiting wings, wings that have never known the air, wings that will soon carry it higher than it ever crawled.

This is the part of the story we never see. The part that happens in secret. The part that requires the most courage.

Because the ladybug does not fight the dissolving. It does not cling to its old form. It trusts the process. It waits in the dark, knowing that the work is being done even when nothing seems to be happening.

How many of us are in that stage right now?

How many of us feel like we are falling apart, when really we are being remade?

How many of us are hanging upside down in the dark, unable to see the wings forming, unable to feel the color coming, unable to know that this is not the end—it is the middle?

IV. The Emergence: When the Waiting Ends

After about a week—though in the dark, a week can feel like forever—the shell splits open.

What emerges is not quite a ladybug. Not yet.

It crawls out slowly, vulnerable, soft. Its body is pale, almost translucent. Its signature spots are barely visible, ghost-like, waiting to darken. Its wings are wet and crumpled, folded like forgotten laundry.

For a long moment, it simply clings to its empty shell. It does not try to fly. It cannot. Not yet.

It begins to pump fluid through its body, forcing it into the veins of its wings. Slowly, painfully slowly, the wings begin to unfurl. They stretch. They spread. They become what they were always meant to be.

And then it waits again.

It waits for its shell to harden. It waits for its colors to brighten from pale yellow to deep crimson. It waits for its spots to darken from grey to black. It waits for its destiny to set.

Only when it is ready—only when the transformation is complete—does it open those wings and lift into the air for the very first time.

The creature that began as an egg on a leaf. The creature that looked like a monster. The creature that dissolved itself in the dark. Now drifts on the summer wind, a living charm of luck and resilience, a tiny miracle wearing spots.

And no one who sees it now knows what it cost. No one knows about the waiting. No one knows about the dark. They only see the flight.

V. What the Ladybug Teaches Us About Life

So what inspires me about life?

When I watch a ladybug, I am reminded that we are all in the middle of our own story. We are so quick to judge our current chapter as the final one. We look at ourselves and say, "I am still crawling." Or, "I am stuck in the dark." Or, "I am soft and pale and not ready."

But the ladybug does not resist its transformation. It does not rush. It does not panic. It trusts.

It trusts the stem that holds it. It trusts the shell that protects it. It trusts the dark that transforms it.

It teaches us that the work done in secret matters most. That the waiting is not wasted. That the breaking down is not the end—it is the preparation for the flight.

You might feel small today. You might feel overlooked. You might feel like you are hanging upside down in the dark, watching everything you thought you were dissolve into something you do not yet recognize.

But the wings are coming.

The color is coming.

The flight is coming.

You are not stuck. You are becoming.

VI. Questions for the Journey

So now I leave you with this:

What is the stem you are clinging to? What is holding you steady while the work happens in the dark?

What old version of yourself are you being asked to release, to dissolve, to let go of so something new can grow?

What wings are you waiting to unfurl? What color is just beneath the surface, waiting to brighten?

And most importantly: What would it feel like to trust the process, even when you cannot see the result?

The ladybug does not ask when. It does not ask why. It simply trusts that the shell will break, the wings will dry, and the sky will still be there when it is ready.

The sky is still there. It is waiting for you.

And when you are ready—when your wings have hardened and your spots have darkened and your time has come—you will lift into the air, and the world will see what was being made all along.

A miracle.

Wearing spots.

Ready to fly.