The Importance of Giving Flowers
All my mother ever wanted from my stepfather was flowers. I’ll never understand why it was so hard for him to just go to the store and buy her some $5 flowers. Anytime she was asked what she wanted for a birthday or holiday; her response was “flowers”. And yet, he probably gave her flowers 3 times in their 22-year marriage. I started to buy my mom flowers any moment I could, especially when she was sick. And since she has died, I buy flowers for her for every holiday and set them up next to her picture. Yellow tulips were her favorite, but she loved them all. The more colors and varieties, the better. A diamond bracelet could have never created the smile on her face that a simple bouquet of flowers did. It got me thinking, why is it that something so small meant literally everything to her.
Now my mother wasn’t this super deep philosopher. She’d probably laugh at my analyzing her love of flowers. If asked, she would probably reply “I just think they’re pretty!” But I know it goes so much deeper than that.
I don’t have any scientific evidence on hand showing that flowers contribute to serotonin production or something like that. I don’t think I need it. Flowers are aesthetically pleasing to the eye. They remind us of the beauty of the world. When we look at beautiful things, we start to feel beautiful and we can focus on the beauty around us. When someone gifts us flowers, it’s like they are showing us how beautiful they think we are by giving us something equally as beautiful.
There’s more than just beauty to flowers. Flowers teach us some of life’s most important lessons. Flowers bloom in the harshest conditions, like after a storm. It may look like the flower will die during the storm, like there’s just no way it will make it, but it does. Flowers come out of the cracks of buildings, in random abandoned fields full of trash, sometimes they grow inside your home and you have no idea how it’s even possible. Flowers show us that it does not matter if your conditions are not “ideal” but that you can bloom wherever.
Flowers also show us the importance of observance and not possession. If you pick a flower up because you want it, eventually it will die. Now if you go to the field where the flower is every day and watch it, water it, talk to it, give it love without disrupting where it is planted, that flower will bloom. People are like that too. Often we love someone so much we just want to take them into our possession because we think we can help them more than they can help themselves. More often than not, what we do is hurt them by plucking them from where they are planted and hinder their growth completely.
There are many reasons giving flowers are important. It shows the person you’re thinking about them, what flowers remind you of them, what you think that person would like. When you gift someone flowers you’re essentially telling them “I thought these were beautiful, so beautiful, that I wanted you to experience them as well.”
