Stop and Smell the Roses

You have to stop and smell the roses along the way. I have done that literally on my way to work many times. There was a planting of roses in downtown Seattle near my work. Of course, that was pre-Covid. Now I work from home full time and have only been to the office once in the last two years- and that was just to clean out my desk.

But I do go for daily walks and enjoy the flowers and trees and just mowed grass in our neighborhood. Have you ever savored the smell of freshly mowed grass – especially if you didn’t have to do the mowing? It is so fresh and clean and refreshing.

And then there is the aroma of cooking wafting through the air. Whether it is barbeque, cookies, and other baked goods, or even coffee brewing, it gets your mouth watering and your stomach growling if you haven’t eaten recently. I fell in love with the smell of coffee long before I learned to love the taste.

One of the side effects of covid they say is the loss of taste and smell. What a terrible thing to go happen:( I know there are much worse things about covid to be sure, but losing the sense of taste and smell is nothing to sneeze at. I remember my mom saying how her mom at some point lost her sense of smell so much that without looking at them she couldn’t distinguish between an onion and a strawberry. I don’t know how accurate that was, but I remember it to this day as a terrible thing.

Taste and smell are closely related and are very important to our awareness of our surroundings. We depend on them to warn us of food gone bad on the one hand and to heighten our sense of anticipation for the feasts that we enjoy. I happen to enjoy almost any food, with notable exceptions, and that allows me great variety in eating.

But do we take the time to savor the tastes and smells that we encounter every day. Or do we just gobble down and hurry on our way and fail to fully appreciate what our senses make us aware of? How many times have you rushed through a meal and barely tasted it? How many times have you walked by a tree or bush and not stopped to lean into the aroma? As the songwriter said “sometimes you have to stop and smell the roses along the way”