Picking Flowers and Other Important Things

I still remember the first day I really sat with the outside world. I was 15. I was failing school. I was confused. I was anxious. I was young. As most teenagers are, when an adult tells you something might help, we don't always listen. We give them a smile and move along with our day. Because we know more than adults, right? This particular day I decided to listen. The voice of my mama telling me to go get some fresh air. I took a journal with me; not expecting to use it, but so I could give myself the benefit of the doubt for showing up.

I arrived at my most favorite park. I sat down. I waited. I wasn't sure what I was waiting for but I think that was the whole point. I didn’t show up expecting something to change. I showed up expecting nothing. I showed up to show up. I think that's something that we don't talk about enough. Something as simple as showing up. I sat in the park, zoned out on a tree because I wasn't sure where else to look. At this moment I felt something shift. My heart rate slowing down. My mind drifting away. I began to notice the things around me. 

I didn’t realize before this moment, but when I choose to do something for myself, I never did it because I felt something from it. I did it to convince myself that I wasn't a nobody. That I wasn't lazy because I didn't want to go outside. But this time it felt different. I felt different. 

I noticed that when I looked at the trees, I could see the way the bark climbed all the way up, connecting the branches to the leaves. The way the grass curled itself around the stump. I remembered how in the past my mind felt like an overgrown jungle. Branches crossing each other. Roots pushing through the ground with nowhere to go. Everything growing in every direction at once until the whole thing became too dense to walk through. But now they are lighter. Like someone had cut a path straight through the middle.

Something else I began to notice was that at that moment, my life hadn't actually changed. I was still fifteen. I was still failing school. Still confused about who I was supposed to be.

But sitting there, watching the wind move through those trees, I realized something I had never noticed before. The world wasn't moving as fast as I thought I was supposed to be.

This whole time I'd been trying to win in a race against nothing but myself. The trees weren't trying to change their shape. The grass wasn't trying to change its color. The flowers weren't trying to grow faster. Everything around me was just growing steadily. Slowly. Exactly as it was supposed to. And so did I.

I think about that moment a lot now. Because without those slow, almost unimportant moments, I don't think I would be the person I am today. I would probably be walking down a completely different road. A road without all the little flowers growing along the side.

And the thing about the human mind is that it seems to believe it’s supposed to figure life out. Like if we just sit there long enough thinking about everything, eventually it will all make sense. So we sit inside our own heads stacking thoughts on top of thoughts, building entire mental cities out of possibilities, memories, fears, and plans, convinced that if we just keep thinking long enough we’ll eventually understand something. But the mind doesn’t actually work like that. The more pieces you pile in, the harder it becomes to see anything clearly at all. Clarity doesn’t show up when the mind gets louder. It shows up when the clutter finally starts to clear. When you slow down enough, your nervous system slows down with you, the turmoil in your head begins to settle, and suddenly the moment you’re standing in becomes clearer than the thoughts you were lost inside.

So from that day on, I decided to let the flowers do their thing. Let them grow out of the ground, find their way into my heart, and bloom somewhere up in my mind.