The Flower in Your Hand

A marigold sits in an open palm. Bright, heavy-headed, already loosening at the edges. By tomorrow it will have dried, or been offered, or been thrown away. It lasts a day, maybe two.

And that is exactly why we notice it.

We tend to value what is delicate, what is fragile, what is limited. The things that will not stay. A flower is precious partly because it is on its way out — and somewhere in us, we know it.

But here is the quiet trap.

When something beautiful passes, the mind holds onto it and keeps trying to recreate it. That compliment from a stranger. The dish you tasted for the first time in a new city. The fragrance of the air on a mountain, after a long, sweat-dripping trek. The first time a film reached out of the screen and startled you.

The moment goes. The memory stays. And we replay it — again and again — as if replaying could bring it back.

It cannot. But notice something: even the memory can only be felt now. There is no other time available to us. Every experience you have ever had, including the ones you are trying to relive, happened in a present moment — and can only be re-touched in this one.

So the question is not how to hold onto beautiful things. Nothing holds. The question is whether we are awake enough to be in them while they are here.

Most of the time, we are not. We eat without tasting. We walk without feeling the ground. We hold a flower and think about our to-do list. The moment is fully present; we are only half here.

This is what expressive arts therapy gently works on — not analysing the past, not fixing the future, but bringing you back into your own senses, in the present. Colour, texture, sound, movement, mark-making: these are not decorations. They are doorways back into the moment you are actually living in.

The flower will not last. Neither will this afternoon, or this feeling, or this breath.

That is not a reason to grieve. It is the reason to arrive.

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Tune2Rhythm — art-based psychotherapy and creative wellness with Khushboo Shah, Ahmedabad.