“Sometimes, the most beautiful experience with a flower is brief.”

In my last post, I wrote about reading Ingrid F. Lee’s book Joyful & experimenting with accessing joy through little, tangible things. I also wrote about an early memory of being delighted by a playful activity.

One time my naani, my maternal grandmother, had us kids make little plates and cups from the kind of kneaded dough that Indian rotis (flatbreads) are made of. Later, we baked these in the hot Delhi sun to create miniature utensils.

It was a delightful act and one of my early memories of joyous creativity.

But after I wrote that piece, I remembered something else. While making these little utensils and seeing their final form was delightful, afterwards, once they started cracking in the next few days, I had felt something else.

I had felt a sense of loss.

It was as if I’d had a big high, and then there was this immediate low. I was too small to articulate it, but somewhere in my consciousness, I thought: Oh, I feel sad. I don’t know if I want to do this again soon.

So, this joyous memory was tinged with a feeling of letdown.

Remembering this made me think of how, sometimes, as highly sensitive people, we might not choose joy when it feels fleeting & comes with a sense of loss afterwards.

As I was feeling this, I read more of Joyful, and came across some passages that speak directly to this feeling. In the book, Ingrid talks about the pleasures of the changing seasons, and about how “while seasonal pleasures can be particularly intense, they also have a bittersweet undercurrent.”

Ingrid talks of a young woman telling her about this mixed feeling & about her own thoughts around this:

“When I see the cherry blossoms, I feel joyful and sad at the same time,” a young woman named Aya told me, gazing up wistfully at a tree in full flower. Almost as soon as they open, the delicate blossoms begin to shed their petals. “

“While through a Western lens, it seems this might diminish their joy, for the Japanese it actually heightens it. They have a phrase mono no aware, that is hard to translate into English but loosely means “the gentle sadness of things.”

Ingrid tells us that this phrase is used to describe “a pang of pleasure that exists alongside an awareness of its fleeting nature.” This is very different from the Western world, in which we tend to shy away from these fleeting pleasures.

She then tells us about something the florist Sarah Ryhanen had told her: “The number one question you get when you have a flower shop is ‘How long is this going to last?”‘ She shrugged her shoulders, as if she simultaneously understood the impetus for the question and was frustrated by it.

Then, Sarah went on to tell Ingrid something I found really beautiful.

“Sometimes the most beautiful experience with a flower is brief–like these garden roses from the field. They are so fragile because they put all their energy into making this intoxicating scent, which means that they don’t last more than twenty-four hours on your kitchen table. But those twenty-four hours you have to smell that flower are pretty amazing.”

Ingrid contrasts this with the Japanese, who instead of trying to avoid the transient nature of their favorite season, embrace it. She tells us that the vast majority of cherry trees planted in Tokyo & around Japan are from just one species, the Yoshino cherry.

This means that “By choosing to plant just the one type of tree, the Japanese have created a landscape designed to burst open in one glorious éclat, to herald the arrival of spring not with a steady trickle of different blooms but a single abundant spectacle.”

And “while the beginning comes all at once, so does the end.”

When this happens, when the petals fall, Ingrid tells us, they fly around in great clouds that the Japanese call hanafubuki, which means “flower blizzard.”

They fly like confetti and scatter in the rivers and in the streets. They have a last flourish of celebration before the sadness comes. But even in their withering, there is the promise of another season.

I found this Japanese philosophy and what Ingrid says so beautiful! Instead of being afraid of the feeling of loss, we can choose to experience the joy as well as the sadness of fleeting pleasures.

I wish someone had told this to the sensitive, intense little girl I was, who felt everything so keenly and who decided, for a while, to let go of joy, so she didn’t have to also feel the sadness. The answer was not to close up, but to remain open.

Ritu Kaushal is the author of The Empath’s Journey, a book for sensitives creatives that talks about art therapy, working with dreams and more. SIGN UP HERE for Ritu’s newsletter in which she curates resources about sensitivity and creativity. This also gives you two free chapters of The Empath’s Journey.