Don't pluck the flower!

This world is an extremely beautiful place.  I don't know if I write that line because I am in a particularly good mood. But yes, I have been awe struck by the amount of beauty that we're gifted with all around us. I shall try to say what I want to in the simplest manner my eloquence allows me to. Basically, I won't be an arsehole on this post, as long as language is concerned. 

Imagine a flower. It is the simplest non-human thing that might come to one's mind when one hears the word "Beautiful". Let's be a bit more specific. Let's imagine a white rose. That makes things a bit clearer in my mind for some reason. Its very image exudes purity, femininity, delicacy, and needless to mention, beauty. All the qualities we associate with things that appeal to our senses. 

Now say, someone is walking down a street, and he/she notices this white rose. The person becomes infatuated with the rose, entranced by its beauty. The typical response of a person is that he/she wants to OWN the flower, possess it in exclusivity. So, he/she plucks the flower and walks away happily, thinking that now the flower belongs to him/her forever, and that he/she can show the flower all the adoration and admiration in his/her capacity forever. Specially now that he/she owns the flower. And so, the flower, in the mind of the person who plucked it, shall remain ever indebted to the plucker's admiration and affection. 

Here's where things really go spiraling downward for the plucker. 

Little does the plucker realize that the flower, the moment it is plucked, is dead. All its vitality, all its exuberance that the plucker found it with, remains no more. And so, it shall wilt. It will wither away. At best, it will find itself crinkled between pages of some book that someone will open ages after when it was originally kept there as a remnant of the beauty that it possessed.

You know what's worse? Now that the flower has been plucked, its beauty is lost to the world, because the world can see it no more, for it resides no more on the same street that many walked by.

Owning something, or let me be more blunt, owning someone means making the thing.person give up its/his/her own will. The thing with someone/something that loses his/her/its will ceases to be the person whom the you admired. And so, since the thing/person remains no more the one you admired, your admiration for it/his/her fades away, until the admiration the object of admiration entitled to itself, turns into contempt for the once-admirer. 

I read this some place that if you find something beautiful, admire it. Acknowledge its beauty. More importantly acknowledge your fascination/ admiration for its beauty, and then, let go. You have no entitlement to its beauty. All you can do, at best, is to allow its beauty to flood you completely without wanting to hold it within you. 

Someone told me "You don't own me". I was naive, and stupid enough not to realize what the person meant by that at the time. I was more-so stupid to get offended hearing it. It just skipped through my ability to comprehend. That line never meant that I was to be denied what I admired. It simply meant that I shouldn't be so hell-bent on wanting to control the object of my admiration. Even now, I THINK that I understand what I heard. But frankly, you never now. Actually, I never know.