Endorphins

Several minutes later, she cries again, “El! Stimulates endorphins! Smell them! Smell the flowers!” 

By Ellen Park

At least every other day, my mother professes her love to a small patch of daintily self-sufficient flowers on our front lawn. She leans down very close to them and affectionately tells them how pretty they are. They prawn and preen in a little muddy bed, flutter with the breeze and seduce the bees. I wish that I could now authoritatively meander into some engaging botanical dialogue, but regretfully I am only able to tell you that I think they are just pansies or something. We can romanticize the moment and call them roses, if you’d like. But the interesting part is that my mom has this quasi-scientifically founded theory on the endorphin-related benefits of delighting in flowers.

“El? El?” she cries. “Look at these flowers! Look at the colors! Smell them!”

She’s outside and I’m inside, probably fiddling with the Playstation.

“No.” I mutter. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. Ready, set, go. Accelerate.

Several minutes later, she cries again, “El! Stimulates endorphins! Smell them! Smell the flowers!” She lets out an exaggerated sigh of indulgence that makes me want to laugh. But I simply keep accelerating.

 “El!” she calls, “Why not look at them, they’re gorgeous. Colors rich…like butter…” More ecstatic sighs. “El…you never smell my roses…I don’t think you have enough endorphins…” 

But to further reinforce and theatrically demonstrate these benefits, she dances around the pansies, her arms and wrists tracing loopy invisible patterns in the air, all the while singing endorphins! endorphins! as the rest of us watch from the large window, making her seem a bit like an improvised television act. The spell breaks when my dad hurries back to work to finish something industrial before tomorrow and my younger brother goes away. So I head upstairs to do some homework.

As someone who has lived nearly (and perhaps only) two decades, from time to time I find myself lamenting my dire situation of an ever-increasing age and a seemingly ever-increasing lack of time. When I was younger, people told me I would soon become an adult and that I’d be forced to have such-and-such responsibilities, pay such-and-such taxes and combat a million different issues, ranging from air pollution to who cleans the bathroom to spare the rod or spoil the child. That’s so depressing! Since then I have been bustling about, consciously preparing to become this horrible thing called an adult, hurtling myself into tough work, making myself into a streamlined, lean, mean, adult-machine. These days, people will jokingly tell me that I am no longer a teen but a full-fledged adult. Besides my momentary wave of nausea and strike of sheer terror, my other reaction is, “I am?”  

How quickly time has passed, and passes. And I’ve been flying by with it.  

At least every other day, my mom says that I never stop to “smell the roses.” It literally took a physical effort to make me smell those darn roses, to realize that I didn’t have to rush through time, do everything with “adult” bleeping in my head, hurl myself toward the end. It happened while I was in a rush. I was eating with a friend, we were talking between mouthfuls and when we had finished eating, I picked a slight pause in the conversation to attempt to make my exit. I had things to do. 

"Well, I’m going to go now,” I explained. “I’ve got things to do for tomorrow.” 

He eyed me curiously and told me to stay, for we had been talking only a short while. 

“Ummm,” I said, “no, I really have a lot of things to do.” 

 I wasn’t sure what those things were, but I knew they were there, beckoning, on my desk at home. Big piles of responsibility. Loads of (things that can wait) work. I got up to leave. Suddenly, my dinner partner got up, grabbed my arm and cried, “You’re not going anywhere! You’re staying!” 

He pulled me back in jest, and we continued to struggle in fun, but in the end I stayed and we talked until the mall closed. Interesting, funny, almost elated. And you know what, nothing catastrophic happened when I came home that night and woke up the next morning to my big piles of responsibility.  

And so, as an unofficial valedictorian and ex-veteran but ardent subscriber to and of youth, may I offer two words of advice to all classes graduating from anything, everywhere: Endorphins! endorphins! 

  *****

--EP
copyright 2000, Ellen Park