Give Your Flowers!

Morning Thoughts #128

Sometimes, when you've reached a decision in a land with no name, it takes time to understand you've arrived. The slog of youth, trudging through the mud of unclaimed years, your beating heart used to aping communist slogans, making an ideal out of living through but not owning this year, this era, and eventually, perhaps, your whole life.

One day, though, you may awake in a home that has become a strange land - you've returned - but this returning can also be a moving forward. The past can save us time in the future.

Once you've completed the necessary life stage of youthful escaping, the more important question becomes: what wants to escape ourselves but only up to the point of blooming? What will you make of your life? I suggest: create for the sake of flowering, as if all the world may be inclined to lean in to smell.

Here’s how my creation short stories begin: I don’t understand the purpose, but I feel for the tinge. What wants to grow out of me? I sit this morning, knowing if I spend too much time on my phone, on unfocused activities of passive consumption, it is as if some sun has been blocked - I will delay the discovery that only comes from growth. Have you done everything you can to situate yourself in your ideal climate; aren’t you curious about your blooms? Why not begin each day with a question: what do my flowers look like, how do my fruits taste?

As for me, I write, and there’s no strong evidence my words will be picked for many bouquets - but when I finish something, and in my heart, feel an inward assurance that it was worth finishing and an organic outgrowth of my true spirit, I feel satiated, I feel calm in myself. It isn’t something alien to me that I present as my own - it isn’t an empty outstretched hand only grasping for sense impressions - to flower is to give yourself in the truest form you can find in a given moment. The nature of honest giving is joy; our initial, fumbling steps are the process of discerning what our individual nature allows us best to give. Woe to those who confuse their initial uncertainty for an empty impulse - unsure of what it is they have to give, they have not the patience for the question so cease pondering on it and proceed only to take.

If you can’t give everything (and, for the most part, who can?), give something. Through the small burst, the first petal of insight that naturally emerges - you begin to discover the shape and color of your true mature offerings.