My Life as a Rose
So, I’ve been thinking about this flower for a long time. Thinking about it long and hard. And I can’t determine if flowers are smart or fortunate. Highly intelligent in choosing their life form if they had a choice in it. But really, I guess we all had something of a choice in how we decided to interpret reality. Right?
What is it that humans fear most?
Change. Think about it. Humans fear change the most out of anything. In the morning when you wake, it’s uncomfortable because you don’t want to move. Infants cry during birth because the change is so incredibly dramatic. People fear death because besides birth, it is the most drastic change we can interpret. No one knows what death brings and yet it is so terribly feared by many because of the change. From living, to not living. From singing to silence.
You could say that many people desire change. But I’d say that people want to be changed but don’t ever want to be changing. They want new conditions, but the process is uncomfortable, unsettling, difficult. What we truly want is to find a good moment, freeze and be that way forever.
But time moves on. Hearts are broken. Hearts are healed. Things change. People die. And people are born.
The thing we fear most is constantly haunting us and the thing we want most is an impossible reach to obtain. All we can do is enjoy the tragic adventure. Because we’re alive, right? We might as well live!
But flowers… Oh flowers have it. Their change is slight. Their change is absolute. They grow into themselves, become beautiful and stay put until death. Their roots dig deep into the earth and claim their territory, their space and their time in the world. They are the most consistent creatures in existence. And yet, they can still communicate. They can still procreate. They can still live admirably in an ever-changing world. They aren’t distracted by each another. They get what life is about long before any man does, if any man ever does. The flowers, they have time to consider it. And they live. And then they die.
And no, I’ve never once seen a flower cry at death or scream in sadness. No, not once. Not ever.
Which brings me to my next point. Flowers are engineered one way, we’re engineered another way. The thought struck me as my alarm went off the other day. “I can’t possibly have heard the alarm as it went off. I can’t possibly see things as they are happening.”
Not only does sound and light take time to travel, but the brain has to take some amount of time to process and interpret the information it’s receiving…right? So no matter what we do, because our brains are not constant we are constantly living in the past because we are intrinsically blind to the present.
Which brings up my final point. Our brain interprets the information we accept as our reality. But what about the information it cannot interpret? What about the information our brains are not designed to understand? What are we living ignorant to, amongst?
We don’t know anything but what we do know! Which comparably to all the knowledge in the universe draws terribly near to zero’s limit.
I’ll end with a quote from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead:
“Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death?
There must have been one, a moment, in childhood,
when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever.
It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory.
And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all.
We must be born with an intuition of mortality.
Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words,
out we come, bloodied and squalling…
with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass,
there’s only one direction and time is its only measure.”