The Flower with four leaves

…a little story about being, choice, and awareness…
Once, there was a big tree. This tree had many flowers. They were beautiful white and all of them had four leaves. All but one. This one flower had five leaves.
The fact that this single flower had five leaves instead of four made it very special. It made this flower different from all the other flowers. At least, that’s what she made herself believe in the end. At first she didn’t know that she was different. She was just there, together with all the other flowers, being a flower and not aware of any sort of difference. But this big tree had an amazing ability. It was giving each flower the ability to think.
So, these flowers were all thinking the same thing: they thought they were beautiful. They all thought that their leaves were the most beautiful. That the yellow buds where complimenting the ivory white leaves and that having four leaves was the best amount a flower could have.

And this one flower with five leaves? She was looking just the same. She as well had a beautiful yellow bud and her leaves were beautiful ivory white as well. She had even five of them. But for all the other flowers this was strange. Why did she have five leaves? Why not four? And why was she different? They didn’t understand. So, they started to talk about her. They were telling each other that she was strange and awkward looking. And sometimes, after a period of hurtful silence, they laughed out loud and made jokes about her. Only because this flower had five leaves instead of three.

You can imagine what happens next. This flower started to feel sad and alone. She didn’t understand why all the other flowers didn’t like her. She didn’t do anything wrong.
More and more she started to close her leaves. Why wouldn’t she? Every time she would open her leaves, all she was getting were jokes and laughter from the other flowers.
And so, after some time, this flower became so sad that it started to wish that it was just like all the other flowers. She didn’t want to feel this. She wanted to feel loved. She wanted to be part of the rest. She wanted to be just white with four leaves instead of five.
And after some time she decided to change something about herself. Because she was now convinced that she was not beautiful. She was not like the others and therefor not as beautiful as they where. Now, she would make herself more beautiful. So, one night, she took all her courage and changed the colour of her five leaves from white to pink. It was really beautiful indeed. The flower was hoping that all the other flowers would see it and would find it so beautiful that they would love her and accept her. But instead, when the other flowers woke up the next morning and saw the new, pink leaves from this special flower, they started to laugh even louder. They were saying it was ridiculous. Why would she draw even more attention to herself? She was already weird. This was hurting the flower very much. She didn’t understand. Why would all these flowers be so mean? Why couldn’t they just be nice to her?
She became so sad and felt so alone that she closed her leaves for three days. Even on a beautiful sunny day, she didn’t want to open her leaves. She could hear the flowers around her chat and laugh, but was too afraid to open herself again.
Then, one night, she did something very daring. Something so drastic that all the other flowers would see that she is just like them! At midnight, when all the flowers were closed and asleep, she painfully forced one of her five leaves to fall off. It was hurting a lot. It was, as if she took a piece from herself, and threw it away. Silently, and with great sorrow, she watched how her leaf fell to the ground.

The next morning, when all the flowers woke up and started to open themselves for the first sunlight, she was full of anticipation to see if the flowers would notice what she did. And believe me, they did. They saw it. All the flowers were looking at that one leaf lying on the floor. All the flowers where watching her not knowing whether she did this on purpose or if it was an accident. Now she was the same. Just like them. There was no more difference between them and her. Immediately they became all very, very silent. It was as if they lost their voices. Not one of these flowers dared to see a word.

Then, something very special happened. From one moment to the next all the flowers started to lose their leaves. The floor beneath the tree became all white from all the leaves that were falling down. It was a real spectacle to see. For several minutes it was raining beautiful white leaves. It was a sight to see. But now, all the flowers were leafless. All but one! One flower did not lose her leaves. This flower, whom desired more than anything to be accepted, to be just like the other so she could feel loved, was the only one left with four leafs. She stood out. Again. She became special. Again!

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Selfish in Nature

We are in nature selfish.

I wrote an article before on egocentric and selfishness. But as you can see I found it necessary to elaborate on this subject.

One of the first things we learn as we grow up from toddler to adolescence to adult is that we shouldn’t be selfish. We should think of others first before we may think of ourselves. We all know the sweet selfishness of the young toddlers when they take whatever they want, don’t want to share and make a whole commotion when another child is taking away their toy. And then we, the adults, do our utmost best to convince this little child, which has no clue what so ever on what you’re talking about, that it is not nice if you are not sharing. Of course we believe we do this with the best intentions and with the convincement that we are making a better person out of this child. It’s for his/her own good and benefit.
While for some part this is true, the intention can be sincere, most often the true motivation for adjusting this behaviour comes from our own childhood where we were being taught that sharing is a must and not liking that someone is taking away your toy is bad. Throughout our lives we are being believed, taught and convinced that selfishness is a bad thing. People are being praised, idolised because of their evidently selflessness while others are virtually being out casted for their supposing acts of selfishness.
And although, again, the intention for this believe might be sincere and coming from a good and healthy idea, the outcome is rather different from an actual lived attribute that is fully understood.

It is true that selfishness can be shaped in any form you want. It is true that you can use selfishness to practice an egocentric lifestyle. But what about self-love? Is self-love evenly to selfishness? I would like to say no but can imagine there is some clarification needed.
When you do a quick research about the meaning of selfishness, egocentric, self-centred or even narcissism, you will soon find that all these terms are described as a characteristic that most people would like to avoid or at least not to be judged on.
The consequences of this division, this need of classification of characteristic attributes, is that pretty everything is quickly thrown on this stack of interpretations.
From this stack I would like to take this one cart; self-love.

True love comes from loving yourself first.
Does this sound familiar? It’s a phrase you hear often these days. On social media for sure you’ll find that one of your friends has posted a beautiful photo with a similar text in it. Loving your self is a must these days. Gosh, there is a predicament. Love yourself but at the same time you need to avoid being selfish.
honestly, I don’t care much about all the designations. I do care, though, that you might feel obliged to hold back on loving yourself just for the sake of not being labelled selfish.
Self-love is a virtue. A self-given quality! Isn’t that a beautiful phrase? Self-given quality.
It already makes me happy by saying it.
But what does self-love mean? For sure it doesn’t mean that you put your own interest above others. Although sometimes you need to do so. And here we have to go back to the previously mentioned designations.

It is in no way possible to distinguish human behaviour in any sort of classifications. When you choose to live on this planet, you did so with the consciousness of freedom. Free in making choices, free in interpretation and free in how and what things mean to you. Classification, uniformity or designations are tools to make things understandable. They are not, by all means, laws to live by. All the words in the category selfish, egocentric, etc. have a general given explanation. Not to give you an ultimate law of how it is but to generally explain what is meant with using these words. It is so important to discover your own conclusion, your own meaning to certain given qualities. Such as self-love. You have an enormous valuable, rich and elaborate dictionary to your disposal, called ‘your heart’. If from anything you want to know whether feel true about it, whether it is something honest to you or a given truth, ask your heart. Feel what your heart tells you, for trust me it will not come to you in beautiful intelligent phrases that you can understand using your brain. It is that soft tone of heart, that utterly pure but oh so serene sensation that you get when being on the right path. That feeling of joy that you only experience when you speak your truth.
These are all forms of expressing self-love. It can include as many different ways of expressing as there are people. There is no one way. There is only your way!
Self-love can mean that you give yourself the liberty to make mistakes. To fender through life never really knowing who you are or what you want from life. It can include that you willingly and consciously choose to live alone. That you deliberately decide to think of yourself before others just for the sake of learning to love yourself. It honestly is beautiful to explore the love for yourself. Give yourself room, give yourself ability and perhaps for most; give yourself the pleasure of making mistakes. As I mentioned before in previous post, you have nothing to live up to. There is absolutely nothing you have to achieve! Nothing you have to earn or do before you can be what you want to be.
You are already complete!