A few days ago, my wife was watering the flower garden while my son and I stood nearby watching her. I noticed a weed sticking out of the ground, bent down, pulled it out, and threw it away. At about the same moment, I felt a sharp pain on the top of my foot. I was wearing flip-flops, and whatever got me did not mess around.

The pain hit instantly and intensely. It felt like someone had driven a hot needle straight into my foot and then left it there. Within seconds, the sting was burning hot and demanding all of my attention. For those first few moments, the pain was all I could think about.

When I came back to my senses after a few seconds, my first reaction was a bit of anger, but I was more curious and annoyed. I looked around and realized I was probably stung by a bee. Then I looked around more closely and learned it was actually a yellow jacket, but at the time it did not matter much. Something had stung me, it hurt quite a bit, and now I had to deal with it.

I found some medicine we had in the house from years ago and rubbed it on the spot. The sting was painful, but it wasn’t a major event. The rational part of my brain understood exactly what had happened. I had gotten too close to a nest without knowing it. An insect had reacted the way insects react. End of story.

Except it wasn’t the end of the story!

As I looked around, I noticed a small burrow near the corner of the garden. I had seen a few of these little insects flying in and out earlier. Now I knew where they lived. That was the moment a completely different thought entered my head.

I wanted revenge! Not protection or prevention. Not even removing a dangerous nest near the house. I wanted revenge. And the funny thing is that I understood the situation perfectly. The yellow jacket had not stung me because it hated me. It had not woken up that morning planning an attack. As far as its tiny insect brain was concerned, a giant creature had suddenly appeared near its home, and it did what millions of years of evolution had programmed it to do.

I knew all of that. I also knew where the nest was. So I grabbed a can of insecticide, pulled up a stool, and sat down nearby. At first, nothing happened. Then one appeared. I sprayed it. A few minutes later, another one showed up. I sprayed that one too. Sometimes two would arrive together. Sometimes one would crawl out of the burrow and immediately find itself covered in poison. The process was surprisingly slow, as they appeared so sporadically. I spent around thirty minutes patiently killing them one by one, and during that time I was thinking about what I was doing. What surprised me was not the anger, but how much satisfaction I got from it.

Each time one of them lost the ability to fly, struggled for a few moments, and then stopped moving, I felt a small sense of victory. Not because I was making the yard safer or solving a problem or whatever. It felt satisfying because I was settling a score, and I even thought of that too, a strange thought! The score itself was absurd. One sting on my foot versus fifteen or twenty yellow jackets. Yet somewhere in my mind, that math worked. At some point, I remember thinking, “Okay, that’s enough. I think we’re even.”

The strange part is that I genuinely meant it. Looking back on it, I don’t think this story is really about yellow jackets. It is about how quickly my mind built a rational framework around an emotional decision that was already made. I had not lost my ability to reason after getting stung. In fact, reason was working quite well. It helped me identify the nest, choose a method, sit patiently, and carry out my little campaign efficiently. The emotion came first. Reason simply joined the team afterward.

We often think of reason and instinct as opponents, as if one defeats the other. My experience was something less flattering. It appeared that, in this case, instinct picked the destination and reason helped draw the roadmap. The yellow jacket was acting on instinct when it stung me. I would like to think I was operating on a higher level. Yet for about thirty minutes, sitting on a stool with a can of insecticide in my hand, I am not entirely sure the difference between us was as large as I would like to believe.