Stop and Smell the Roses

In a recent conversation with a colleague, I was given a piece of advice in the form of a cliché. Now, as a writing teacher I don’t just warn students to avoid clichés; I scorn them most unmercifully. I execrate them, I inveigh against them: unlovely lumps of language, lexical ossification, verbal riffraff, impoverished expression, jejune junk rusting on the philological landscape, vacuous verbiage, lazy locution, handy pegs upon which to hang shiftless thinking. Confronting a cliché, I have the tolerance of a pillaging Anglo Saxon and the subtlety of barbed wire. And yet, for reasons I cannot account for, my colleague’s cliché mugged my self-righteous scorn and left me silent, my linguistic pockets empty and turned inside out. It resonated, and I have been thinking about it ever since. He told me, “Jerry, you’ve got to stop and smell the roses.”

Previously, I had considered “smell” the pivot upon which this cliché turned. Smell being one of the sense, I took the cliché to be a warning against being too cerebral, against living in the shallows of abstraction, an implicit appeal to the flesh, to breath and pulse, to direct and immediate intimacy with the sensuous surround. After all, who could deny that the beauty of a rose deserves more homage than a passing glance, that it in fact deserves a glance inflamed to a gaze? Who could deny that it deserves being experienced with a fully embodied sensory appreciation that savors its obviousness and its nuance, the delicate fold of each of the 50 cupped petals, their velveted tactility, their gradual unfurling as they whorl outward from a densely packed center, the reddish conical thorn tapering to a white tip, the intense olfactory assault of fragrance. Who could not apply to roses what Wallace Stevens imputed to the whistling blackbird: the beauty of their inflections and the beauty of their innuendos? Who would not agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson that roses “are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.” Who would not understand Robert Burns comparing his love to “a red, red rose” or Robert Herrick’s advice to “gather ye rosebuds” while we can? For me, then, my colleague’s cliché had in the past emphasized the filagreed grace of nature’s aesthetic expression, the importance of its felt texture to our all too often distracted lives, an experience experienced as an experience.

But hearing it this time, now, it struck me that the resonant word was “stop.” Measured by most psychosocial metrics, we are afflicted with busyness, little different from the way Thoreau 160 years ago characterized us as “in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises.” The leaden foot on the accelerator of making a living inches downward, and we neglect living. We see that living has a length and forget, as Diane Ackerman observes, “the width of it as well.” We somehow fail to see that busyness is densely caloric but without nutritional value, that every article that appears touting some scheme for time management to organize our busyness leaves unchallenged and, thus, naturalizes the assumption that we should be engaged in frantic activity. It is telling, I think, that we so often define our self-worth by how busy we are, by how often we confuse being productive with being busy, how often we equate not being busy with a lack of self-management, with how often we consider not being overscheduled, not multitasking, not being stressed and pressed a sign of indolence. We read, or hire, lifestyle consultants to organize our days and little regard the style of our lives. The kiss of the rose is given only to those who stop long enough to receive it.

To stop is to reflect, and perhaps that is why we don’t. It can be, often is, disheartening to be the audience of our own performance. Reflection necessarily involves not instrumental knowledge but what Hans Kung calls “orientating knowledge,” a knowledge that cleanses mental space of debris, a knowledge of the congruence between the persons we are and the persons we most want to be, of the values we accept with unthinking dogmatism and those we most want to commit ourselves to. Tangled in the traces, we canonize our autonomy without understanding that the granite substrate upon which it rests is our capacity for self-reflection, our capacity to disentangle, to step out, to conjure ourselves standing beside ourselves, and regarding, really regarding, the who and what and why and where and how we are and ought to be. It is hard work, harder and busier than any work we do to get a living. It interrogates the fine-structure constant of our individual universe, corrals our scattered thoughts and returns them to the mindful present. But it is the busyness that we should more often make it our business to mind.

I recall coming home late one Saturday afternoon to find my dad sitting on the family room couch, feet up and hands behind his head, staring, it seemed, at the point where the wall met the ceiling. I had seen him in this posture before and it always struck me as strange. This time, however, I inquired:
“Dad, what are you up to? Is something wrong?”
Oh, no; I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Oh, stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Well, you know; things.”
My dad. The systems analyst. He wasn’t mowing the lawn or fixing the toaster or reorganizing the garage, wasn’t writing a report or outlining a presentation, wasn’t pouring over the specs of the latest line of IBM office computers or calculating whether or not they would improve efficiency at the Cincinnati office. No. He was far too busy for all that.