It is a vestige of our modernist past that we remain so deeply committed to efficiency. We’re giddy at the utterly unfounded promise that AI is going to give us all the four hour work week. We imagine all we could get done on our morning commute if Elon Musk’s ones and zeroes drove us to work. We not only cook our “meals” in the microwave but grow impatient with waiting. Like the nefarious magician in the story of Frosty, we’re busy, busy, busy.
“Stop and smell the roses” is both an argument against strict efficiency and strictly efficient. That is, those five words are a rough summary of the roughly 500 words I’m asking you to read. It is efficient, but also poetic. Caught in those five words are both instruction on the importance of things that can’t be measured by efficiency, like beauty, and beauty itself.
Stop may be the most efficient of the five. It tells us what to do, or rather, what not to do. Don’t keep going. And is useful as well, connecting stop and the rest. The likewise does its simply task, but only takes three letters.
It’s smell and roses that carry most of the freight, but also that evoke the most from our souls. Smells, of course, have a way of doing that. They are carriers, evoke-ateurs if you will. Something immeasurable is able to transport us to another time, to flood our hearts with joyful remembrance or bitter regret. Smells remind us of the power of the background that we so easily overlook.
If you were to ask me to describe the cafeteria at my grade school I could give you its dimensions, the materials it was built of, the arrangement of the tables. I might even describe Mrs. Lamb, who punched your card on the way in. Even with her, however, White Rose perfume would be more potent. Or, I could give you a deep whiff of eau d’ bologna in lunchbox. And you’d not only grasp my cafeteria, you’d be transported there.
Then there are the roses. From one perspective they’re just another carbon life form. They grow by photosynthesis. I can draw you a map of its DNA. All of which would not get you closer, but rather drive you further away from what a rose is. They are meant to be taken in with our eyes. They are meant to be tasted with our noses. Roses are ephemeral and sublime. Which is why they require of us that we stop.
God has not, however, left us only with roses. He calls us to stop and behold His sunsets. He commands us to stop and listen to the songs of His stars. God encourages us to stop and touch the downy skin of our newborn babes. All because they are high voltage reflections of His glory, of the beauty of His holiness (Psalm 96:9). To pass by the roses is to insult the Great Gardener. To stop is to walk with Him in the cool of the evening.