The Flowers are Dying…and That’s What Makes Them Beautiful.

There are some realities we often spend our lives trying not to think about: time passes, things change, people leave, bodies age, and our lives are finite. That can sound incredibly bleak. But there is another side to it. When we stop demanding that life stay beautiful, exciting, or comfortable all the time, we can begin to appreciate it in its entirety. The mundane days count. The uncomfortable seasons count. The endings count. Knowing that something won’t last doesn’t necessarily make it less meaningful; it may be exactly what gives it meaning.

Jenna was throwing out the flowers when she stopped to appreciate them one last time.

A week ago, she'd brought them home and arranged them carefully in the good vase. They had been almost ridiculously beautiful, soft pink peonies opened into layers of tissue-paper petals, white ranunculus curled tightly around pale green centres, and little stems of baby's breath filled the spaces between them. In the afternoon light, the whole thing seemed to g

low. Jenna had moved the vase twice just to find the spot where the sun caught the petals best.

For a few days, they were perfect.

Then the pink faded. Petals browned at the edges and began dropping onto the table. The stems sagged over the rim, and the water started smelling vaguely like a swamp. They died. As all things do. So, naturally, into the garbage they went.

It occurred to Jenna that we have a strange relationship with flowers. We think the bloom is the flower. But blooming is a remarkably brief part of its life. For a few days, this living thing was at the pinnacle of its aesthetic beauty and indeed, the most crucial part of it’s life cycle. Before that, it was a seed, a stem, a closed bud. Afterward, it wilts, dries and returns to the earth.

We just don't put those parts in vases. Maybe life was like that too.

Jenna spent so much time waiting for the blooms: vacations, falling in love, celebrations, good news. But most of life happened between them. Monday mornings and 2 pm on Wednesdays at work. Folding laundry. Driving home. Making dinner. Sitting on the couch when nothing particularly interesting was happening. Nothing particularly wonderful or terrible.

And suddenly, that didn't seem so bland. How incredible, really, to get any of it at all.

A human life is finite. There would only ever be so many Monday mornings, so many drives home, so many ordinary dinners and afternoons when nothing remarkable happened. Even boredom required the extraordinary privilege of being here to experience it.

Jenna looked back at the dying flowers. Their wilting no longer seemed like something that ruined their beauty. It was evidence that they had bloomed at all. Maybe impermanence wasn't the unfortunate part of being alive. Maybe it was what made being alive matter.

Therapy isn't always about fixing something that's wrong. Sometimes it’s about seeing how your perspective changes what you think is wrong. Sometimes it's a place to explore the bigger questions: how you want to spend your limited time, what gives your life meaning, and how to be more present for the ordinary moments instead of always waiting for the next bloom