On Edelweiss and Daily Wonder

A little something I wrote at the beginning of the year.

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I woke up this morning with a song in my head. I’m not sure why, I haven’t seen The Sound of Music in years. But as I stepped into the shower this morning, Edelweiss was singing itself to me.

As the hot water washed over my body, I thought about the boy who might have written it. A young Austrian or Prussian or Bavarian—I didn’t know the history of the song or who wrote it or even what the edelweiss flower looked like, if I’m honest. But there, basking in the steam, I imagined a young man sitting in stillness, noticing, even being overwhelmed by the beauty of a single flower.

Anyway, it made me think of Jimmy Carr, who is delightfully insightful once you get past the dick jokes. He said once that even the least of us in the West live better than nearly every king who has ever lived.

The hot water of my shower. The warmth of the jacket you wear in the winter, far lighter and less…pungent than animal skins. The oranges I didn’t think twice about packing into my lunch bag this morning.

Oranges don’t grow where I live. They don’t grow for a thousand miles from here—but here I am, peeling them for my lunch—tasting the brightness that costs me next to nothing to experience all year round. Not in money. Not in hassle.

Then I thought of the man whose livelihood it might have been to cart oranges and other exotic fruits from the places they grew to the richest nobility in the settlements of the north. How tenderly he must have stewarded them, how carefully he must have guarded them. How much joy he must have encountered when folks saw him coming—delighted they would finally get to taste of the warm weather and sunshine that grew them. For the first time in months. Or years. Or perhaps their entire lifetime.

How much we take for granted every day. Every hour. This very minute.

A little girl in my son’s class died over the Christmas holiday.

A car accident. The kind that could happen to you, or to me, or to any one of us.
The kind that does happen to some of us every day.

The only gift we are each given the day we are born is the promise of our one-day death. For some of us, it comes too soon. For others of us, it is dragged out to the point of undignified cruelty.
We don’t get to choose, or to know which is coming for us.

Wouldn’t it be better to stop and smell the edelweiss? Wouldn’t it be better to notice the beauty and wonder that surrounds us instead of just surviving?
That’s the irony, isn’t it? Because we can’t survive. Not in the end.
That’s the whole point.

I ended up looking into edelweiss, after. Turns out it is a lovely flower. It grows at high altitudes in the Alps, and yes, it is a symbol of beauty and deep love, but also of bravery—because once upon a time, the only time you would encounter these flowers was if you were brave enough to climb into the harsh environments in which they grow. It meant something. They were a symbol of something important. Something real. And I can’t help but think that we’ve lost that sort of meaning in today’s world. And that makes me sad.

Hug your loved ones today. Smell the next flower you see. See it. Notice it. And put yourself in the shoes of our ancestors who came before us every once in a while. The ones who built us. The ones we could never have existed without. And just…be grateful.

E.

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P.S.—The song Edelweiss was written for the musical The Sound of Music. I was slightly disappointed to learn it wasn’t a lovelorn lad pining in a sparse landscape, but doesn’t that just reinforce the wonder of music? You can live many lifetimes through a single song—and you learn something new every day.

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Follow Your Curiosity

Here’s the Jimmy Carr clip if you’re in a hurry, or the full interview on Diary of a CEO.

For further reading on the legendary edelweiss flower from a Swiss authority | The Mystical and Mythical Edelweiss