Just enough nectar beautiful bee!!

So, over the past month or so I have been feeling a bit down and kind of questioning whether I was on the right track or I was making the right decisions or not. You know, when you have an idea of what you want to do with your life, things become a bit hard. You have to be a bit more focused than when you didn’t know. Everything you do must work towards accomplishing the 1 thing you want to do. Right? Wrong.

For the longest time I was beating myself up about being “scattered” all over the place, doing this and that. Like right now, all I want to do is take pictures and bake. I have not bought a proper camera for myself as yet, but I have started towards that and the pictures are coming in. I started feeling like I just start things and never finish, I was feeling really bad about the other ideas or plans I had made, some of which I had started working on. Then this morning as I was reading around on the net, I came across a very interesting blog and post that totally liberated me. The greatest illustration and lesson I walk away with from that blog post was that painted by the writer about a bee’s visit to a flower. Well, she didn’t call it that, but I’m kind of making it my own, so I will write it like me. She says in life and with things we do, we do them to get what we want, and once we have gotten what we came for, we ought to leave. Already get where we are going with the bee? I will spell it out either way. Imagine you are watching a bee fly towards a flower, determined to get nectar. Once the bee reaches the flower it sits on it and starts sucking up as much nectar from the flower as he can. Two minutes later, the bee leaves the flower, and bewildered you think, noooooo, the bee shouldn’t leave, it must remain on the flower and suck up some more nectar. To your best ability you try and steer the bee towards the flower (I hope no one does this), there is still so much more nectar on the flower, and the bee has the potential to draw out some more, why is it leaving? You scream and shout, but against all your efforts, the bee flies off.  Sound familiar?

  Maybe let’s bring this closer home. Sometimes people around us begin great endeavours and exploits that we think may change the world. We urge these people on and we applaud from the sideways as we watch history in the making. The next thing we know, the protagonist in our great history story is not interested anymore, they want out. And we, seeing the great potential this person had, we try by all means to encourage them to stay, tell them not to leave before their breakthrough. Is that more familiar than the bee? Well, it’s the same principle really. Often we find that, even though the bee or the history maker has gotten what they had come for, onlookers often want them to stay longer. The sad thing about this is that it is done in the name of encouraging people to live out their full potential and out of a place of love. And sadly, there are people who stay on and they never get to explore beyond that one flower or.

It’s great to identify potential in people, but where it becomes deadly is when we try to chain people to just one thing because we have seen their potential there.  There have been so many people in my life who have been well meaning, but were also likely to clip my wings before I started to fly if I had listened to them. I would have been in jobs I wanted nothing to do with, cities that sucked the life out of me, perhaps even in relationships that stifled me.
So, don’t ever feel tied to something just because you started it , if you don’t want to do it anymore or you have got what you came for stick around, fly off to the next flower beautiful bee. Your potential is multifaceted, has many characteristics that may die if you try to compound it all into just one thing. Explore and live out.