Reflections on the limits of understanding

1. The Bee in the Swimming Pool
Reflections on the limits of understanding

2. One day this past spring I was swimming in an outdoor pool in Mill Valley, California.
Through the trees I could see Mount Tamalpais looming over the cities below. Far away higher floated the afternoon fog.
I could hear the sounds of children at recess from an elementary school next to the pool property.

3. There in the pool water before me, a bee had landed. I have no idea why it chose (or was forced) to land in the
pool. The bee struggled futilely to take flight. But the weight of water on its wings and bodies kep the bee from
escaping.
After a few minutes, the bee would drown.
In a moment of cross-species humanity, I scooped up the bee in a handful of water and set it down on the
concrete beside the pool.
The bee staggered around for a few seconds, then took flight.

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote:
If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.
Likewise the bee, which can communicate well enough within its own hive: how could it understand, much less
express, the vast, overarching network of human institutions and motivations that led to its salvation from
drowning?

5. But for that matter:
How much does the individual bee understand the emergent properties of its own hive; the hexagonal shape of
the comb compartments, the choice of the queen, the purpose of the scouts, the timing of the swarm to a new
hive location miles away?
Much less the motives of the beekeeper?

6. What if humanity is like that bee: struggling to stay alive and continue with its appointed tasks, but unaware —
and incapable of such an awareness — of the overarching forces that govern the world we live on and the vast
spaces we live in?
Perhaps “miraculous cures,” spontaneous remissions, and other unexplained — and perhaps, for us, inexplicable
— instances of good fortune are far away, overarching forces analogous to my cupped hands rescuing the bee.