I recently attended a conference titled The Wisdom of Change. Before the speaker began, he set a jar containing several bees on his podium. We watched closely as he took off the lid, certain the bees would escape into the audience. At the end of his presentation, every bee was still in the jar. “They’ll stay stuck in there forever,” he said. “They don’t know there’s a way out because they never look up.”
Predictability is comfortable. Fixed routines, thoughts, and ideologies feel safe. We like to know what to expect and enjoy the security of sameness. However, like the bees, when we don’t expand our vision, we can get stuck.
When a plant remains in one pot for too long, its growth is stunted. It ceases to flourish because the roots need fresh soil and more space for healthy development. In order to thrive, the roots need to be able to spread in different directions.
It is also true of us. Remaining complacent for too long hinders our growth. We become rigid when we exclusively choose media that strengthens our own ideas. We stay static when we only surround ourselves with familiar people, patterns, and priorities.
Fear, pride, comfort, and expectations fuel our resistance to change. They cause us to close our fists around old stories that may no longer be accurate; ways of seeing the world that may no longer be appropriate. It’s frightening to loosen our grip and move beyond what we know. Yet, when we desperately cling to what is, we miss the beauty of what might be.
Much of our pain results from our refusal to alter course. We stay trapped in our biases, addicted to our own ways of thinking, stuck in broken systems. Like the bees, we so often choose familiarity over freedom. However, when we remain open to exploration and change, we might look up and discover a way we hadn’t noticed or considered. We might realize the lid has been off the whole time.
“Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.”
John Wooden
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