Stop and smell the roses sucks

How ignoring the advice made me finally understand it

Stopping to smell the roses never quite worked for me because I’ve never had a very good sense of smell.

Still, I did it a bunch because it was a saying and sayings tend to stick around for a reason. So in the literal sense, it worked—I stopped and smelled roses. But in the more important sense, it didn’t work because I was merely stopping to smell flowers. And whenever I couldn’t smell them—which was most of the time—I’d get disappointed and miss the point entirely.

Which is to slow the fuck down, be present, and enjoy the journey.

Cut to the other day: I was sitting in my living room on my couch, trying to clear my head. I just happened to look over at a plant in my living room that I must have looked at a thousand times before.

But this time, something was different.

The plant I looked at.

It was fucking stunning. Everything from the happenstance composition to the late-afternoon sunlight to the subtle and washed-out colors made it look like an unexpected, beautiful painting. I must have looked at this plant for, no exaggeration, 20 straight minutes, just in awe.

Unfortunately, like most photos, it in no way captures what I experienced in that moment, with my own eyes.

It was simple.

Effortless.

Present.

And absolutely captivating.

And then it struck me—omg I just stopped for 20 minutes to “smell the roses.”

As an artist, I’ve always been more of a visual person. Hilariously, it turns out that I’d been largely missing a feeling of presence because I was trying to brute force one sense (smell) when I should have been using another sense entirely (sight).

Sometimes the literal words of advice may not work, but the underlying concept behind the words often will. Which leads me to:

Stop and see the painting.

I fully believe that nearly any moment in your life—even and especially annoying or even ugly—can be paused and visually reframed to experience beauty:

• Looking at a plant you've seen in your living room a thousand times

• A stack of magazines in a doctor’s office, cast with obnoxious fluorescent lighting

• A woman pulling out her checkbook at the grocery store like it’s fucking 1995

• Walking down an alley at night, a streetlight flickering in the distance

• A loved one in their final moments, surrounded by a few close family members

You might have to crouch down. You might have to stand on a chair. You might have to twist the blinds to a slightly different angle.

It doesn’t matter how you reframe the moment.

The point is that you can reframe the moment.

Our experience doesn’t necessarily have to be our experience. We underestimate the bidirectional nature of the relationship between our inner and outer world.

If we can stop and visually reframe our outer experience to find beauty, our inner world can start to reflect that beauty. Another way to say it: it’s possible that another person could have sat on my couch that afternoon and instead of thinking, “Wow, look at how beautiful that plant is,” they would have thought, “Wow, I can’t believe they haven’t texted me back yet, fucker.”

And that annoyance makes the world a bit more annoying. And a bit more dim.

Which makes our inner experience a bit more annoying. And a bit more dim.

Reversed: the more you look around and actually see what you’re seeing, the more you’ll want to look around and actually see what you’re seeing.

So look around.

Stop and see the painting.

Because after a while, you realize that it’s always there.