Relay Column: Is Life Like a Flower? (Ren Itoh)

Sometimes we make a common analogy and compare life to a flower. We go through infancy like a budding flower, and just when we think we've reached the full bloom of youth, we quickly wilt and the flower scatters. Even if we live until old age, our lives are considerably longer compared to that of flowers. For example, even for a flower that only blooms once a year, we can witness its cycle 70 or 80 times. Yet, when people look at the relative shortness of a flower's life, they don't feel reassured or anxious by their own relative longevity. Rather, they think about the shortness and transience of our lives. It's a curious thing indeed.

After all, people don't see the entirety of a flower's life. Whether you're a grade schooler keeping an observation diary, you don't sit in front of a pot and keep gazing at the bud swelling, blooming, and eventually withering. Our interactions with flowers are such that one moment it's a bud, then after a while it blooms, and the next moment it is withering. The fleeting impression of a flower's life – and by extension, life itself – is likely more due to the gaps in our awareness when we look at it, than to the process the flower itself goes through.