Toe in the Water

Choices

Choices

Today, through Question of the Day, Lilith of House Martell asked about smelling the flowers, both literally and figuratively. The first was easily dealt with as I had in fact smelled some flowers quite recently. It wasn’t my fault that they turned out to be plastic.

When it came to figuratively, however, I found that I had too many instances to mention. I realised that my days are full of stopping to smell the roses, whether they be the pattern of light created by a sunbeam through the branches of the tree outside the window to the floor of the corridor, the differing creatures to be found in abstract patterning of bathroom tiles, a cool breeze on my skin as I pass a partially open door to the outside, or a hundred other sudden glimpses of the infinite in the least and most humble moments of life.

The very admonition to “stop and smell the roses” is intended to awaken us to these moments in the general hurly burly of modern existence, to tell us that there’s still time during our busy days to enjoy moments of insight and pleasure such as these. And yet it seems to me that I’ve spent my life enjoying such moments. Indeed, it may be that I have spent more time in enjoying the world than in pursuing the adult pastimes of having a career and “getting ahead.” I am forever the child caught dreaming on the view outside the schoolroom’s windows.

When I wrote my answer to QOTD this morning, I thought everyone was like me, that I was merely expressing the experience of us all when I gave those few examples of distraction in the tiny dramas of life. Thinking about it afterwards, however, I realise that there must be many who are not seduced by the cascade of beautiful moments that constitute life. There would be no need of that wise saying about flowers were we all in the habit of smelling them anyway.

No, it seems that many of us don’t have time for such diversions. These would be those who become rich or are too invested in the rat race or, by ill luck, forced to spend all their days in arduous labour merely to survive. Good advice to those able to listen, we might think, and yet is it not a choice that we all make, to remain as a child in our perception of such simple yet beautiful things, or to knuckle down to the hard business of making a living? Easy enough for the rich man to answer with his ability to buy as many roses as he might wish, so who is the winner now?

I suppose it all depends on which race we decide to enter.


Word count: 460