Why We Love Receiving Flowers
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| The Love Letter by Eugene de Blaas |
I've been dancing onstage for around eleven years now. At this point, it's inevitable that somewhere throughout my ten Nutcracker shows, someone will leave flowers in my dressing room. Despite the fact that this has happened every year without fail, however, I'm still surprised each year. I've received flowers from family, friends, and my special friend, but every time I'm delighted. I take them home, trim all the stems, put them in a vase, and change out their water for weeks until they become an actual biohazard and I'm forced to either throw them out or dry them.
I love receiving flowers. I cherish them. Carnations are my favorite, but I'd be happy with anything. But when you think about it, flowers are actually kind of pointless. They don't do anything. They're about as useless as a gift can be, and they consume resources instead of giving them back. Logically, we shouldn't really appreciate them as much as we do. Yet people have still been exchanging them for years, and I'm not mad about it. In fact, I really appreciate them.
"Pretty things. . . like flowers and sunsets and rubies and pretty girls, too. . . they're like billboards telling us that life is good." -- William Inge's Picnic
It's true that flowers serve no effective purpose, but they still have a very obvious benefit. Flowers, if nothing else, are pretty. They're beautiful, and they serve as one of my favorite reminders of God's creativity and wonder. When I have flowers sitting on my desk or nightstand, I stop to stare at them at least ten times every day. Not only are they attractive visually, but they smell good, too. (Unless you're allergic to pollen, in which case you should probably stop smelling flowers.) My room has smelled like flowers for about three weeks now. It's driving my brother insane.
I think we as humans have a natural attraction to beautiful things. We like pretty people, pretty sunsets, pretty leaves, and pretty flowers. We enjoy being around beautiful things, and I think it's because we know that God makes beautiful things. The same applies when it comes to flowers. We enjoy giving them to each other and displaying them because they're beautiful, and we want to share that beauty with others.
"I don't want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?" -- Ray Bradbury's The Veldt
Because flowers so readily capture my attention and distract me from my work, I could spend an absurd amount of time just looking at them. I'm not kidding when I say that I have probably given up hours throughout this month alone just staring at them and smiling. Every time I notice the flowers in my room, I think about the person who gave them to me. And this is the benefit of being the giver of flowers. For the mere price of 4 dollars at Publix, you can have me thinking about you every hour. I can't help it. When I look at my show flowers, I think about the show, the audience, and the dressing room. When I look at my prom flowers, I think about how bad my feet hurt, how pretty my dress was, and how much fun I had. When I look at flowers from my boyfriend, I think about how grateful I am for him, how much I miss him, and how excited I am to see him again. By giving a girl flowers, you're earning a place in her thoughts that could last anywhere from two days to two years, depending on how long she keeps them. With how busy my brain is, the extra time spent thinking about you that the flowers give is a serious bonus.
"She's had no love."
"No! -- Well, you must make up to her."
- D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
Not only do flowers make me think about who gave them to me, but it shows that they were thinking of me. Flowers, as previously stated, don't serve any obvious useful purpose. Nobody has to get me flowers. But they do. And that's why it's so special. I didn't ask for flowers. There's no rule that they have to be given. The fact that someone gave them anyway means that someone cared enough about me to do something that they didn't have to. They went out of their way to express appreciation, and that's a big deal. I'm not saying you have to get anyone flowers. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. You don't have to get anyone flowers. If you choose to get them even with the knowledge that it's not required, that just goes to show that you genuinely do care.
In the Victorian era, floriography, or the Language of Flowers, was a method of cryptological communication used to send messages through bouquets. Though I think very few people are still using a secret floral code to send a specific message, the idea of using flowers to say things that we struggle to find words for is still a popular one. Giving someone flowers can say all kinds of things, from "I'm sorry" to "I love you" to "I know you're allergic and hope you sneeze." In situations where we aren't sure what to say or how to say it, sometimes flowers can say it for us.
Receiving flowers, as simple as it may seem, means a lot. No matter how many times it happens to me, I don't think I'll ever stop being excited about it. I'll just have to figure out what to do when someday I run out of space to store them all.
"There are nice things in the world -- and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked." -- J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey
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