a bee drowned in honey (and I understood)

bee fly still

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“Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.”

Nikos Kazantzakis

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So. One of the most difficult things to do in Life is to temper, or ration, your enjoyment.

Wow.

That sounds crazy doesn’t it?

It is kind of odd, but happiness, or bliss, has some similar characteristics to despair in that once you get in the quicksand of the feeling it is incredibly difficult to get out.

But, you may ask, despair I understand … but why the heck would you want to get out of the bliss?

I won’t answer with the trite ‘there can be too much of a good thing because I struggle to find an example of too much good thing. Instead … I will suggest that drowning is simply drowning.

It is about the inability to handle the situation.

It is about losing control.

It is about encountering a reality that ultimately you cannot deal with.

saving someone drowningThat is drowning.

But maybe even worse <in my bliss example>?

You actually can swim, but you have just become so immersed in the bliss of the moment you have forgotten to swim.

Yeah.

You drown even though you can swim <ponder that>.

I will point out that this is very very easy to permit to happen.

Especially if, contextually to everything else in your life, this honey appears to be water in a Life dying of thirst. In other words, we confuse the honey for water.

That may sound weird, if slightly unbelievable, but it happens to us all the time.

Sometimes Life is such a grind day to day it makes us thirst for anything to relieve the dryness of the grind. Relief comes in a variety of shapes and forms – some healthy & some unhealthy <self help books with formulas for Life & social media come to mind>.

This means that when the moments of bliss or ‘honey moments’ occur we stop and dive into the honey as deep as we can and drink as if our thirst can never be quenched.

And sometimes we drink so deeply we never stop to breathe.

And sometimes we dive so deep that no matter how big a breath we took before we dove … we run out of air … and drown.

Yeah.

I know.

In such a crazy world where the most of people deserve some extra happiness and true bliss it seems pretty stupid of me to talk about drowning in a honey moment.

And I will admit.

I never thought I would ever write about drowning in bliss in a cautionary tone.

Well.

Maybe all I am really offering is simply a word of caution.

Maybe it is a reminder that maybe there are more moments than you imagine and you don’t need to drown in one … just recognize, like most bees do, that if you are persistent you can find honey everywhere.gg answers are everywhere

Maybe I just saw this quote … paused … and could clearly see in my mind how we worker bees could easily drown if and when we found honey.

Maybe I just worry, on occasion, today’s world can make us so thirsty for honey we forget to not drown when we actually find some honey.

Maybe I realize I like drowning <I am a voracious reader and user of some social media and love working>.

Or.

Maybe I just liked thinking about why a bee could drown in honey.

<originally posted November 2015>

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Written by Bruce