Bees and Cliffhangers
What is it about feeling uninspired that brings stress and tension? These uninvited visitors barrage you with disjointed thoughts, thoughts that signal a looming avalanche, or thoughts that climb into repetitive lists—these thoughts climb your shoulders as if survival is at risk while you dangle from a precipice, even if blockages and barriers exist in a dozen tomorrows, past the future in front of you.
Your hierarchy of needs is askew. Instead of climbing the scarp in your face, you prefer to criticize faulty tools, preparation, or time itself. You favor distractions. Meanwhile, your head space frets like the buzz of bees.
Letting go, falling, might be simpler.
Honey bees divide labor. Imagine worker bees didn’t escort a young queen on her foray into the world. Would she worry about climate change?* Stress about her waistline? Feel confident—she would funnel energy into recruiting workers.
When you’ve accepted restraints, gathering resources becomes less burdensome.
You choose to create. Ignore the destination, what you wish to paint, compose, or score. You’ve made that choice. Break down the project into as many units as you can. Subdivide those, then those. Prioritize or jab blindly, choose one particular micro-problem to write on its own piece of paper.
How will you quiet the fret of thoughts? Smash the mountain down until only the vista remains?
Ready? Persuade yourself to discard the turbulence in your head in favor of a single motive. Detached in a space of frenetic hubble bubble, hover, you are a worker bee with a purpose, one: look after the queen. Disassemble the noise in your head until you identify the deeply horrifying place where you feel absent. Empty. Vacant. Panic sets while fingers slip from the cliff. This is where the queen’s journey begins into vistas unknowable.
Read what’s on the piece of paper out loud. Close yourself off and laugh because humor helps. Despite rising fear, you remain safe. You drop into undiscovered parts of yourself; you are not driving blindfolded across an active freeway at rush hour.
Nothing! Prepare yourself for the babble of fear.
Faith. Courage. What you feel may not be fear of failure, but fear of famine. You prefer expectations and apologies to this awful spot, this widening hole, this ongoing horizon of desolation. But in this vacuum, truths push through and begin their whisper.
Patience. Trust the inner voice that speaks too softly. Support it. Stay with it—and for an extra good and long measure, stay after it, stay in the void—until your path of action reveals itself, accompanied by a chorus of rejoicing, a buzz of excitement.
*Not to suggest we shouldn’t do something about climate change. Taking a lesson from bees, I accept responsibility, hack at the issue until manageable: drive less, recycle more, and watch what I purchase.