Flowers For Me

Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes is a fantastic story. I read this story a long time ago in high school and to this day I remember it vividly. The guy in the story is mentally unaware due to his brain not functioning as most of ours does and so he doesn’t understand the more complexities of life. Essentially he is still a child. He thinks simplistically without the different areas or shades between the lines so he isn’t troubled or bothered. He is happy; he finds happiness from the most simple of life’s enjoyments. He takes an experimental surgery which allows his brain to function within normal parameters and as he grows, he learns more. The lab runs tests between him and a mouse to test the growth of his mental capabilities. He learns about the good and the bad. All the bad and complexities of life discouraged him and he began to grow depressed. He had lost that sense of childlike mentality and wasn’t able to enjoy the things he used too. Soon he grows too smart. So smart that he is isolated from the people he had come to know. He begans to wish that he could revert back to his life before the procedure where he again would be happy and could enjoy the simple things. He finds out that there’s a limit in his intelligence growth before he would revert back in to his former state. Then the mouse, his only companion dies…

So profound. The story of most of our lives! Seriously. As we find ourselves being bogged down with the unnecessary things that have become human life, often if you are like me, we find ourselves reminiscing about the simpler days. You eat, you drink, you poop, you sleep and that was about it. There was some play in there, mixed with sleepovers and the promise of pizza but essentially that was everything. The most you worried about was whether or not you left enough cookies for Santa! Life these days is only becoming more complicated it seems. Once life was small and contained within a family group, then a tribe, then a village, then a town, then a city, then a state, then a country, then a continent, and now we are global. There was a lot of awesome things that came with global connections such as travel but now the complexities of life have grown so large it’s easy to find yourself lost and bogged down. There was a good week I found smiling a hard thing to do. I was doing fun things but I just wasn’t able to enjoy any of it. When life gets like that, it may mean you have to change something. Do something else, find some time to sit down with yourself, or get out there to find new hobbies/people/etc.

We all have lost each other in the folds of life. It’s so easy to do. If you can, cut out the complexities and get back to the life that you can enjoy. Sometimes we long for things that just aren’t the right things for ourselves and it’s okay to explore to find the right path.