Flowers

Some years ago, I started a quiet, personal tradition: I began buying myself flowers.

It wasn’t a grand gesture. Just a few stems from the market — lilies, carnations, sometimes tulips — arranged in a vase on my living room table. It brought color into my small space, a sense of calm, and something else I couldn’t quite name at the time. If you visit, more often than not, you will see an arrangement of flowers in my home.

I still remember the first time I did it. I chose white oriental lilies because I love the aromatic blooms and rich purple carnations because I love purple. As I checked out, the cashier smiled and said, “Wow, what a beautiful choice. Someone’s going to be very happy!” I smiled back, but I didn’t tell her the truth: the flowers were for me.

After all, people don’t buy themselves flowers... do they? Especially men?

Actually — they do.
And they absolutely should.

There’s a lingering belief in our culture that flowers are for women, or for romance, or for occasions with gift tags. But flowers are for anyone who finds value in beauty — in the simple, fleeting things that make life feel more alive. Appreciation doesn’t belong to any one gender. Neither does gentleness, or joy, or the need for something soft in a hard world.

Throughout history, men have cultivated gardens, studied plants, painted blooms, and written poetry about their color and decay. Somewhere along the way, we started seeing flowers as fragile, and fragility as something to avoid. But fragility is part of life — and part of what makes beauty so meaningful.

For me, flowers have become a reminder of that.
Yes, cutting a flower shortens its life. But it also gives us a chance to pause and see it — to hold it close, admire its form, and let it speak in the quiet ways beauty often does.

There’s something profoundly human about this gesture. It’s our way of trying to pause time, even knowing we can’t. We cut flowers not because we forget they’ll fade — but because we remember. And in that memory, we honor the moment. We take flowers to a loved one’s grave as a way to pause and reflect on the beautiful person that is no longer physically with us.

Flower arrangements show up in our biggest life transitions: weddings, births, funerals, goodbyes. They express joy and sorrow. Hope and loss. Celebration and consolation. In their stillness, they remind us that beauty and impermanence are always entwined.

Maybe that’s the deeper lesson:
We don’t cherish things despite their fragility — we cherish them because of it.
And holding something delicate, even briefly, is still worth it.

So if you’ve ever wondered whether you should buy yourself flowers, let me answer that for you:
Yes. You should.

Not because you're waiting for someone else to do it.
Not because you're missing something.
But because you are here. You are still blooming, in your own quiet way. And that’s worth noticing. That’s worth celebrating.

Buy the flowers.
Place them where you’ll see them.
Let them remind you that this life — brief, imperfect, and beautiful — is always offering something worth pausing for. A flower doesn’t need a reason to be beautiful.
And neither do you.

Take care of yourself and each other!