"The Wisdom of a Simpler Life"
Focusing on What Really Matters, Really Helps
I focused on the flowers in the flowerbox, ignoring the screaming and yelling of the young couple inside, behind the heavy sliding glass doors that separated me from them, that separated the sunbaked balcony where I sat from the minimally cooler apartment where they wrangled, that separated me and the silent flowers that were my stoic companions from the constant stream of venom and barely controlled rage leaking out from inside.
I could hear them yelling—heck, half the apartment complex could hear them—the young man and woman, as the moon began to rise behind the car park next to the easternmost apartment building. Their angry words and counter-accusations reverberated off dozens of the parked cars and the facing buildings. The sweltering heat of the late summer day was finally beginning to lesson, but the air still seemed like someone had cracked open an oven and leaned in too close to the eruption of escaping heat.
Maybe that’s what had caused the couple to argue. They weren’t the only ones whose fighting had been heard outside of their apartments, though they were some of the loudest.
I tried my best to ignore them, but being outside alone, sitting in one of the two matching blue deck chairs on the small balcony, it was hard to focus on anything else. Their argument ranged from problems about saving money to problems about not making enough money, problems about spending too much money – in essence, problems with money in all its forms.
I’m glad I didn’t have to worry about money.
It was easy to tell the couple were young and hadn’t been together very long: their argument didn’t feature the kind of sink-the-knife-in-deep-then-twist-it-for-effect comments that a veteran married couple would have brandished with bravado. But what they lacked in experience, they more than made up for in energy and sheer volume. Their voices were so loud that for a moment, I thought there were more than a dozen of them yelling, like a herd of angry cats yowling their chorus of voices at the moon and each other.
I had to stay out on the balcony, despite the heat and the couple’s incessant yelling. I couldn’t remain inside and suffer through the vitriol those two spewed at each other. I had one choice: focus.
I focused on the lone bright spot in view: the small flowerbox that lined the inside of the balcony’s forward-facing railing. It wasn’t a very big container, only about four feet wide, but it was beautifully handmade of stained redwood and wrought-iron supports by some unknown previous occupant. The flowers displayed a surprising riot of color: blue peonies, red geraniums, white pansies, and surmounting them all, a central spread of orange-and-yellow marigolds.
I fixed my gaze on the tall marigolds, miniature green trees surmounted with blossoms like joyous explosions of color. I imagined the tiny petals of the blossoms as if each petal were as wide as a field, blessed with abundant rain and nurtured with a paternal sun.
I looked past their stems into a tightly packed bundle of tubes that drew water and nutrients up from the soil and into the expanding wings of the stretching leaves and their surmounting blossoms. I peered through half-closed lids past the wooden walls of the box and the thick brown earth, into the roots that spread as far underground as their leaves and blossoms spread above.
I left my body and the chair and the heat and the yowling behind me, and lost myself in that cool brown dirt. I traveled the route of the roots, water and minerals and nutrients up, air and carbohydrates and the urge to continue expanding down. I felt the year-long process of slow but inexorable growth compressed into but a moment. I felt the water pelting them during storms, the caress of gentle and sometimes not-so-gentle breezes, the baking of the sun, and the cool darkness when the flowers rested, waiting for the next day’s sunrise to begin their continual aspiration for union with that life giving Orb.
And it worked!
For a time, I was away from the incessant pelting of accusation and counter-accusation. I was in a world where sound was less important that simple sun and shade and water and earth. The simplicity of those elements rendered all arguing moot.
I reveled in that reality where the barest essentials were all that mattered, not whether one had a big enough TV to watch a sporting event, or a matching set of shoes to go with a particular handbag, or a fast enough Internet access for some new show. I was lost in a far simpler, far less complicated world.
I felt the necessity only to continue to grow, to pull the required elements from air and soil, to spread leaves in order to gather sunlight, to extend roots in order to drain every bit of water and mineral from the ground. I felt the joy as an insect landed on the blossoms, brightly colored in orange and yellow and hints of red, and more colors without names that only the insects with their evolved senses could see, but that neither the couple inside nor I could detect.
I felt the planning that went into the combining of all of those elements into the building blocks for more blossoms, more roots, more leaves. I felt the urge to accomplish all of this whenever the sun shone, and the patience required when the sun went away during the long dark at the end of each day.
I sensed the inner awareness that life would not always be this perfect, that eventually, the sun would dip lower in the sky, the temperatures would drop, and when both got too low, the life in the marigolds would come to an end, as it ends for all the world’s life forms, even the couple inside. Even me.
But until that day, I felt the joy of a series of accomplishments: simple growth and mere existence. The marigolds taught me this, shared their satisfaction of fulfilling their plan, a plan stored in a previous year in the seeds of their ancestor’s blossoms, carried to them from millennia of flowering plants before them across uncounted generations.
I understood their desire to pass along that same knowledge, that same desire to grow and expand and reach up to the great shining Orb, into their own seeds, to continue that never-ending chain of life from one to another and beyond them to others uncounted into the future.
I realized, then, the peace and satisfaction those marigolds had in their simple yet elegant lives. They shared with me, on that balcony, in the fading sunlight and the rising moonlight, the Great Lesson of Life, which washed over me like a gentle bath of a warm spring shower:
Enjoy your time here. Make it a productive time. Stretch your face up to the Sun. Make it through this day, so you can make it through the next day, and the days to follow. Commit your energy to growth, and share some of that growth by passing down what you’ve learned to future generations. And share whatever you can with any lives you come into contact with, whether they land on your blossoms for a moment or a lifetime.
I felt a reassuring calmness wash over me as I digested the marigolds’ wisdom. I felt that I could better face any trials by simply reexperiencing the perennial message of Life that they had shared. Even the incessant arguing and fighting of the young couple inside—
It had stopped. There was silence. I don’t know when they had stopped fighting, but all was peace and quiet now. The moon was higher, I noticed, and the sky towards the setting sun was darker than just a moment before. I must have dozed off, or maybe I was so lost in my marigold reverie that time had passed without my noticing.
The heavy glass door slid open and there stood the young couple, his arm around her waist, her head resting on his shoulder. They stared out at the faint sunset, and at me sitting in one of the blue deck chairs.
“You hungry, kitty?” the lady asked. She made one of those distinctly human sounds that they incorrectly imagined was how cats talked to each other, and I realized dinner was moments away.
I jumped down from the chair and trotted inside the apartment. I guessed that the fighting was over for the time being and a truce had been declared.
That was good.
I had dinner to deal with.
About the Creator
David White
Author of six novels, twelve screenplays and numerous short scripts. Two decades as a professional writer, creating TV/radio spots for niche companies (Paul Prudhomme, Wolverine Boots) up to major corporations (Citibank, The TBS Network).
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