Age and Beauty

Age and beauty: Rethinking expectations.

For Mother’s Day, one of my daughters gave me tulips. They had been forced in a vase that allowed water to sit just below the bulbs. Before this, I had only had cut tulips, and while they were beautiful, they lasted only a few days before they had petals falling off. These forced bulb tulips lasted more than a week. And in that time, they bloomed fully as I had never seen tulips do before.

The tulips began as sweet round buds and opened into cups with the dusty black pistils hidden within the petals. Like little slips of satin, the petals opened slowly over days until at the end of the week, the blooms had almost flattened out, leaving the lime green stamen and pistils erect on little platforms, the sepals, from which the petals flounced. This full bloom was news to me. Like a secret revealed as life slowed down, I kept waiting for the tulips to fade, to set aside their glow, and release their petals to the tablecloth below. Instead, the petals stayed attached to their platforms, having completed their 180 degree bow. They opened completely.

My definition of beautiful tulips consisted of tulips in their youth: globes of lush color. But as I watched day after day, as the petals spread, the tulips took on a new beauty, one that didn’t fit the images I expected. The color of the petals, still as vivid, fell away from the delicate green and black within, opening the tulip to its core, to the soul of the bloom. My definition of what a beautiful bloom is changed, and I had to reform my expectations, my internal images of what beauty means. It was just as full at the end of the bloom as it was in its earliest days. It was simply different. Beauty took a different form.

If my definition was based on youth, on limited shapes, and extended by comparison to mean not old, I had limited myself. And I had limited what I deemed enjoyable. This perception may have imposed itself on my perspective of other things in life.

What else do I need to rethink? To let go of? To redefine? What else have I been missing? And where did I get these ideas? And why didn’t I let them go earlier in life? Do I need to open myself as the tulips had to see what I have been missing?

Perhaps so. Perhaps it is time to bloom again.