Catching Bees at the Limits of Imagination

Photo courtesy Rick Scholz

Imaginative possibilities are to a significant extent held collectively. We share ideas about what’s possible, and our imaginations then collectively realize possibilities within those bounds. We call this “reality.”

As a child I had a friend named Tim. One day, I think it was in the spring of maybe 6th or 7th grade, we were sitting on the lawn in front of his house when Tim spotted a honeybee landing on a nearby dandelion.  Without a moment’s hesitation he reached out and deftly picked up the bee from the flower, holding its wings together from behind between his thumb and forefinger.

The bee buzzed in confusion in Tim’s chubby little fingertips as it attempted to fly or maybe sting him, but it couldn’t. After showing me the struggling, helpless insect up close, with a flick of his wrist, he threw the bee into the air, and it flew away.

To say I was surprised at this sequence of events would be an understatement. I wasn’t particularly frightened of bees as a child, but I had been stung a time or two. Because of this, avoiding doing anything that might unnecessarily rile them seemed like a good overall policy. I’d trapped bees in empty pickle jars, but the idea of picking them off flowers barehanded had simply never occurred to me. It seemed sort of crazy and dangerous, and frankly I was surprised as heck that Tim didn’t get stung.

But there he was with a blasé kind of smirk on his face picking bees off flowers like I might pick up marbles.

Tim grabbed another bee.

“Try it. It’s easy,” he said.

I did. It was. Surprisingly so.

Then he upped the game by catching a bee with one hand, then a second bee with the other. This I found even more impressive. The bees buzzed in angry stereo. Trusting the dexterity of my non-dominant hand to pick a bee off a flower took some time. It didn’t happen that first day. I practiced a lot with my right hand and built up my confidence. But eventually, I did it. And not once in the learning process did I ever get stung. It really was easy. And I was amazed and delighted that upon release they just…flew away!

Of course, given our age, this new skill opened up other imaginative possibilities. For example, we could terrorize others at school, chasing them with angry handheld bees.  The point being: once one formerly unimaginable thing had been accomplished, other new and heretofore unimaginable things could also take place. It was a different world.

Our classmates did not particularly like us bee-catchers, however. To my knowledge, nobody else tried it. And you’d think they might, given the prankish power it immediately conferred. But no. Other kids just thought we were nuts.

The bottom line here is that if we want to change the world, we have to make it imaginable, and there’s no better way of expanding people’s imagination of what’s possible than by demonstrating it. Once one demonstrates a possibility, though, it may or may not catch on. There’s usually resistance to doing something new, to perceived risk, to the unknown, and especially to doing something new if it means creating distance between yourself and your affiliation groups.

But for me, the biggest change propagated inward. If one previously unimaginable thing could be done, what else?

Most of the time, we aren’t even shocked as new possibilities become imaginable to us. The process is commonplace. For example, seeing my brother build a model airplane or read books on philosophy, seeing my dad sharpen a lawnmower blade, watching my mom cook dinner or my sister train her dog – all these things expanded the zone of what was imaginable for me to do. I suspect this dynamic explains why we see families with multiple physicians or attorneys, or entrepreneurial families where everyone starts a business, musical families where everyone plays an instrument. And, unfortunately, families where everyone drinks to excess or runs into trouble with the law.

Thing is, I’m not saying my experience of learning to catch bees barehanded was huge or pivotal – that would be overstating the case. However, it did serve as a vivid example of how something apparently wacko and foolish could become, in essence, normal.

Picking up bees off dandelions: not normal. (Unless it catches on.)

Children playing outside on a designated piece of land called a “playground” for a designated period of time as measured by a device called a “clock” during what is termed “recess” — and then a bell ringing somewhere, upon the hearing of which the children all go inside, in unison. That’s normal.

History shows again and again that the boundaries of our imagination are by turns rigid and flexible. People can be amazingly resistant to change. But then suddenly  we can imagine doing previously unimaginable things, including both amazing, beautiful things and things that don’t look so good in hindsight. At the same time, we must recognize that our own imaginations may be limited in ways that the imaginations of others are not. This in itself requires a leap of imagination.

Given the magnitude of change that can flow from shifts in these boundaries, the suggestion here is to pay attention to them as a foundational limit on our perception. As we expand the zone of what is imaginable, we can make better choices about what to do next.