I placed my hand beneath the flowers, almost without thinking.
Not to pluck them.
Not to carry them home.
Only to come close enough to notice their weight.
There they were, blooming beside an ordinary road, asking nothing from anyone. Cars passed. Dust settled on the leaves. The afternoon moved on. Yet the flowers continued doing what flowers have always done: opening themselves fully to a world that may or may not stop to look.
For a few seconds, my hand rested beneath them.
And I wondered how much of life is contained in that small gesture.
When we are young, we often mistake love for possession. When something is beautiful, we want to take it with us. A flower, a moment, a person, a version of our child, a season of our life. We want to preserve it before time can change it.
But time changes everything, even the things we hold tightly.
Perhaps growing older is partly the slow discovery that love is not always about keeping. Sometimes it is about standing close without disturbing. Supporting without enclosing. Allowing something to remain where it belongs, even when a part of us wants to claim it.
In The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes:
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
I have always been struck by the word wasted.
The world calls time wasted when it produces nothing measurable. Sitting beside someone who is unwell. Listening to a child repeat the same story. Watering a plant that may never flower. Waiting for a parent to finish a sentence they once spoke quickly. Staying a little longer at the table after everyone has eaten.
Nothing has been achieved. No task has been completed. No evidence remains.
And yet, these may be the hours from which a life is made.
The rose becomes important not because it is the finest rose in the world, but because someone stayed. Someone noticed when it needed water. Someone learned the shape of its moods. Someone gave it a portion of their brief and unrepeatable time.
Attention is one of the purest forms of love because it cannot be stored for later.
You either look now, or the moment passes.
The flowers in this photograph will fall. Some may already be gone. Another cluster will appear, and that too will disappear. The tree does not mourn each blossom as a permanent loss. It releases what has finished and continues living.
We are not always so willing.
We keep old messages. We revisit photographs. We remember the exact sound of a voice in a room that no longer exists. We carry former versions of people inside us, sometimes long after they themselves have changed.
A child grows, and the small hand that once reached for ours begins letting go.
A parent ages, and the person who once seemed immovable becomes fragile.
A friendship changes shape.
A home is left behind.
A face in the mirror becomes the face of someone we once thought was far away.
There is tenderness in trying to hold on. But there is also tenderness in learning when to open the hand.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet:
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks.”
Perhaps it is difficult because real love does not ask only, How can I keep you?
It must also ask:
How can I stand beside you without turning you into something I own?
How can I care for you without deciding what you must become?
How can I honour the person you are now, rather than constantly searching for the person you used to be?
The hand beneath the flowers could easily have closed around them.
Instead, it remained open.
There are people in our lives who may need that kind of hand. Not a hand that grips, corrects or controls. A hand that stays near. A hand that makes room. A hand beneath them when the weight of living becomes difficult.
And perhaps that is also what we sometimes need for ourselves.
To stop pulling at our own life, demanding that it bloom faster.
To stop measuring ourselves against seasons that belong to other people.
To accept that there are periods when we flower, periods when we wait, and periods when almost everything within us appears bare.
The tree does not apologise for any of them.
It simply remains rooted.
I did not take the flowers with me that afternoon. I left them where they were, beneath the sun, belonging to no one.
But I carried the moment.
Maybe that is enough.
Maybe the task is not to gather every beautiful thing before it disappears. Maybe it is to become present enough that, while it is here, it does not pass through the world entirely unseen.
A hand can close around beauty.
Or it can remain open beneath it.
I am beginning to think that the second is closer to love.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here. I’ve written a small book as well if you’re into that. If you like listening to stuff, do scroll through the selection of podcasts. If you’ve time, have a look at the visuals I’ve made. Grateful for your moment here. Keep coming back here : )
