‘I’m going to kill him’, was my thought.
I had just got back from an event which, as I was the speaker, meant I had been on the go for almost 20 hours straight. It had been a hot, humid and tiring day and I had just got home. You know how, when you finally stop, your body starts shaking from the effort and tailing off of adrenaline? Well that was the stage I was at. One of my antidotes is to lie down on my cool kitchen flag stones, close my eyes and concentrate on my breath and that was when I heard him.
‘bzz, bzz, clunk, clunk, bzz, bzz, clunk clunk, bzz, bzz, BZZ……’
It was a wasp buzzing around and hitting my kitchen window panes. It’s amazing how loud they seem when everything else is quiet. He was incessant and maddingly seemed incapable of escaping via the wide open windows and French doors though the great outside was there.
Are we not wasps who spend all day in a fruitless attempt to traverse a window-pane – while the other half of the window is wide open?
Wei Wu Wei
Big business blundering
As I lay there, willing him to find one of the open exits, too tired to move or contemplate the natural behaviour of wasps it struck me how like a metaphor for old fashioned big business he was. Making a lot of noise, getting more and more frustrated as they keep banging into obstacles and blindingly unable to take advantage of the numerous and obvious escape routes just waiting for them.
If someone comes along to try to help the response is to resist and avoid, then attack and sting the rescuer. Yet, if no aid is forthcoming, they will eventually fall down exhausted and die. With a minimum shift to the left, right or upwards freedom would be achieved and yet they continue to fly around doing the same thing over and over again and (I hypothesise) wondering with bewilderment as to why it is not working.
Quite an apt simile I felt considering my exhausting day had been spent with one of the high street establishments that I had found difficult, though not impossible, to make headway with.
I took pity on the wasp, stirred myself off my floor, found a plastic pot and rescued him, releasing him back into the great outdoors. If only it was that easy with the big businesses who resist embracing the change they need to make in order to survive or is it time to let them fall to the floor and expire?