Just a simple little post about the simple little pleasures that enrich and refresh our lives. When was the last time you were able to stop and smell the roses?
Gentle reader: How does the idea of just dropping everything for a moment to concentrate on you make you feel?
Such a suggestion can be enough to fill some folks with fear. When my anxiety is playing up, I can easily be one of those folks.
Life’s relentless forward motion would have us always pushing on, keeping our heads down to focus on the challenges of the immediate moment. Once the present challenge is dealt with, a multitude of further challenges will likely take its place, each demanding to be dealt with, immediately.
Pausing this relentless forward motion is not always easy. Taking even a brief moment to rest can induce bizarre feelings of guilt.
It is well worth pushing through such misplaced guilt. All too often, rest will seem like a luxury you cannot afford. Rest is nonetheless a good habit – a potentially life-saving one – that many of us need to learn. Rest is priceless.
The true gifts of life
What can you do when life is all relentless forward motion, and moments of wonder seem in short supply?
Sometimes it might take the slightest change of perspective to appreciate the true gifts of life that are all around us. We might need to step into a new and unfamiliar world to experience such feelings. Equally, we might return to a dear place or person after too long apart. Or we can choose to focus on what just one sense is telling us in the moment, as if it was the first time we have experienced it.
Life offers every one of us so many moments of potential wonder. We just need to be open to them.
Roses
July is here. The roses are in bloom. The previous owners of our house planted roses all around the front and back gardens. Over the nine years my wife and I have lived here, these roses have been an unexpected and delightful gift. Despite my doing little to maintain them beyond the occasional spot of dead-heading, they throw forth dozens and dozens of brightest pink and red roses every year.
Each rose perfect. Each rose a tiny and fragile world of beauty all its own.
This brings to mind a brief Zen lesson that I am sure I read many years ago, but which I can’t for the life of me seem to track down via googling (should it ring a bell with any kind soul out there, please do let me know where I might find the exact wording). I will now do horrible damage unto this Zen lesson by attempting my own paraphrase thereof. I think it goes something along the following lines…
With smell the most evocative of senses, the rose cannot fail to transport you to other times and places, to beautiful locations or to the beauty of a loved one.
First, smell the rose, thinking of all the times in your life that you have breathed in that subtle and beautiful scent.
Then banish all of these memories. Forget everything that you think you remember about the rose, all the associations it conjures, everything you think you know.
Now, smell the rose.
No matter where you are in the world right now, nor how busy you find yourself, I sincerely hope that today offers you the chance to stop and smell the roses (real or metaphorical).
May you be nothing but kind today, to others and to yourself.
May today be nothing but kind to you and yours.
IMAGES
- All rose photography by MJCarty.
MJCarty 