Lately, I’ve made a list of places where flowers bloom. I now walk around town with an eye open for pockets of pretty flowers, trees and plants in bloom, burgeoning patches here and there. It could be a colourful world if we were to look for colour. It could be grey if grey was all we saw. I have embraced grey, and I have embraced colour, and I know why the latter is better. I am now trying to attune myself to as much of it as possible. There is an aesthetic pleasure I am now finding in life. I notice more things more often—like the brown of your eyes and how the light green you’re wearing brings it out, how the light makes it all better, and how I could sit across from you for a long time only thinking about this and nothing else. It would be a day well spent.
As for my list of flowers, I would add more to it until spring ends and then, the following year, I would know where to look. It is often in the simplest undertakings we find happiness. And if I were not here in this city? I would continue adding to it wherever I went until one day, it would occur to me that there were flowers, a plethora of them everywhere, if only I was looking. An inventory of things only told us they were many. We do not take stock of the sky. We know it is there. We do not count stars, for we know there is no point. But this aesthetic pleasure, this childlike curiosity I have with flowers, is new to me, and while I know where this journey ends, I must first go through the motions of compiling this list. Knowing how things end is not reason enough to not see them through. It is often on the way that most pleasures are found.
The start did not matter once we began, and nothing ever ended. All we had was the middle. If you don’t have much to do on a Sunday afternoon and if the rote pondering on your walks is exhausting, counting flowers is an excellent pastime. If nothing else, you could always point someone to where flowers bloom. It was important information.