Bees and Buttocks

Bees are industrious creatures.  As individuals they are single purpose driven creatures without individual thought; as a colony they are an amazing, adaptable organism accomplishing task much larger than any individual bee could concieve of.  The most amazing thing is that there is no single nucleus of control in the colony.  The queen does not direct the motions of the workers, they work as a unit.

From a distance people may look like colonies of bees, especially city dwellers.  Often I have found individuals to be disorganized purposeless drones going about their mindless tasks with little thought.  OK - that is harsh, but rarely do we work as a collective, and what labor we do mindfully is rarely for the greater good of all human-bees.  Plus, for most of us there are many locus' of control that get diluted into stranger and stranger disorganized jumbles by they time they get to us.  We are constantly caught up in the bizare mindless "because that is the way we do it" of work, school, government, church, family, volunteer organizations, etc.


I am a good worker bee.  I HATE inefficiency.  I have been accused of being lazy, never by patients, or supervisors, or anyone directly involved with measuring my productivity, but by people (friends, lovers, coworkers) that observe my activities, without any knowledge of the result.   I am amazed by people that use a 20 step process to do what I can do in 3 because "it is the right way."  

Paper work is a good example.  I do as much as possible as soon as possible.  In other words, I know that when I discharge a patient, I have to write a comparison of where they were at evaluation and discharge, and if they have met their goals.  So - when I do an initial evaluation, I fill out the "at eval" section of the discharge summary.  When I do the discharge, I fill out the new information and: DONE.  I do my notes as I go.  I don't think I have ever had anyone wait for paperwork from me.  Why waste their time?  I have to do it eventually.


Although you would never know it looking at my car or closets - I am incredibly organized, especially when it comes to time.  Pathologically early.  And when I have built in free time, I don't fill it up looking busy.  Disorganization in a structure that I did not create is very hard for me, and I have learned over the years that in general, people would rather complain about the "extra work" than do anything to actually eliminate it.   So - with all my extra time, I will breathe, and meditate on bees.