Stop and Smell the Roses

Stop and smell the roses, sounds simple, right? Sounds like such a small/ meaningless task that during a busy day to day lifestyle will get overlooked and undone because we are simply too busy to enjoy the little things in life. Well imagine this small pleasantry gets taken away due to a spinal cord injury and you can no longer bend over or reach out to smell that rose you passed everyday anymore. How about I refer to something a little more real to our current lifestyle, we are advised to stay away from human interaction for the foreseeable future. Our society is going to take a great hit in our social relations now that we are staying indoors for the greater good. These things are what come to my mind when I think about "blissful ordinariness". It's something so small something so little that you never really think about just how important and enjoyable it is to simply bend over to smell a rose or any flower. Just like I now miss the random smiles I would give and receive from strangers at the grocery store. Now to solve my problem, I'm going to start running/ walking outside and will exchange smiles with the people I go by and by using technology to call my family and FaceTime with the people I can so that I can stay involved.

If you were a gardener with a back injury, sitting in a wheelchair, now missing the simple pleasure of being able to bend over into your garden and care for your plants and smell the live you are growing instead of heading inside and becoming a hermit. You could turn to occupational therapy. It would be up to us together to devise a plan so that you can continue to garden and fulfill that blissful ordinariness. I think at this moment if this was my client I would suggest to have a smaller garden on a table. There are plenty of little pots of flowers I see at Lowes, a coffee table could be the correct height for the plants and pushing them up against a window in the living room, so they could get sunlight and air when the window is open. This could be a quick easy solution while as a team we work together for long term solutions. This way you could still enjoy the activity of stopping to smell the roses during recovery and throughout life.