The bee and its New Year’s Resolution
When we brought our Christmas tree inside on December 22, it turned out that it had served as hibernation home for a lone bee. Suddenly in the warmth of our home, she thought it was time to get busy for the spring. She situated herself close to the warmest lamp and proceeded to shed her winter layers, cleaning herself, using up all her stored reserves for a task that could not yield anything.
It was comical, and a little bit sad.
After some hours, we caught her by strategically turning off some lights and lighting others, and released her back into the cold. (By “we” I mean my daughter did it all). I am not sure if she survived, but I fear not.
Coincidentally, I came down with COVID the day after and had ample time to think and even dream about this bee and her plight as I cycled through the requisite hours of fever, coughing, and sweat.
My clearest and most lasting thought was that we all have renewal rituals that are comical, sometimes sad, and often futile. Many of them come about around this time of year: new year’s resolutions.
Don’t get me wrong. I am partial to a good affirmation. Positivity breeds positivity. There is power in believing and asserting something to be.
But I am wary of the values buried in some new year’s resolutions: the moral statements we implicitly make by asserting them. Do you resolve to stop eating sugar because it feels better in your body, or because you feel a need to punish yourself for being a “bad” person who has eaten “too much” of the “wrong” thing? Do you resolve to go to the gym because you want to connect to your body, or because society assigns a positive moral value to being thinner? Do you talk about (or believe) these resolutions as morally superior to, say, not going to the gym, or not declaring January sugar-free?
I believe resolutions that arise from negativity are as sad and futile as the bee’s grooming for spring in December. And what is more: I believe this is ancient knowledge we have chosen to forget.
In the yoga sutra attributed to Patanjali, we are introduced to positive values (e.g. non-violence, simplicity, contentedness), and we are given the tools to return to them when things are hard: positive reflection, community , and empathy. Any type of punitive notion or feeling of superiority is anathema to those.
I try to ask myself this key question when it comes to any type of resolution or course of action: what value statement is buried in this? What are my motivations? Is this something I do to feel “better,” or to feel “better than” ?
The bee’s actions are not conscious. But ours can be.
