Stop and Notice the Flowers

I was driving down a Hawaiian highway when I saw them — yellow-orange-red flowers, everywhere, lining the road like they'd been waiting for someone to look up. I googled them feverishly. Were these new?

They were not new. They were the Hawaii state flower — the yellow hibiscus (Hibiscus brackenridgei). And I had been to Hawaii before. Six years before, in fact. Same islands, same flowers, same me — sort of.

I'm a millennial who started college in San Francisco the same year the iPhone came out. First came the phones, then the apps — the dopamine slot machines, as I've heard them called. Since then, I've struggled with staying present when there's something on my screen. When another human is in front of me, I make a conscious effort. But when I'm alone? I default to mindless, auto-pilot scrolling. I've gotten better. It's a work in progress.

That first trip to Hawaii — for a friend's wedding — was a 10/10. Spam musubis, sunrise hike up Lanikai, cliff-diving into the Pacific, late nights with some of my closest friends. I was also deeply addicted to my phone. Specifically, an app I was using to fill a void I didn't yet know I had.

The second trip, six years later, was for one of my best friends' engagements. Also a 10/10. But a lot had happened in between — I'd moved across the country, been in and out of relationships, survived a pandemic, started therapy, gone through yoga teacher training. There's something disorienting about returning to a place that hasn't changed when you have. The setting is the same. The person experiencing it isn't.

Which brings us back to the car. The flowers. The googling.

The hibiscus had always been there. I had simply missed them — because I did not look up.

Or maybe I wasn't present. Or I was filling every idle moment with my phone. Or I wasn't comfortable just silently looking out the window. Probably some combination of all three.

In that car, I felt like I got to sit with a younger version of myself for a moment. There was no judgment from the version of me sitting in that car — if anything, a lot of compassion. He didn't know he was suffering, or that he was trying to solve that suffering through validation and distraction on his phone. He was doing his best.

Now, I try to stop and notice. It's May in New York, and the tulips planted along the sidewalk by my bus stop in downtown Brooklyn are in full bloom. I probably looked like a loony yesterday, sitting there staring at them while everyone zoomed past me on Livingston Street.

I didn't care.

What have you been walking past?