I was in line at Costco on Wednesday night, and I watched a man stand in front of the flower cooler for what must have been five minutes. He picked up a bouquet of red roses. Put it back. Picked up pink tulips. Put them back. Tried the mixed arrangement. Back again. Finally, he grabbed the roses, a safe and expected choice, and walked to the back of the line looking like someone who’d just finished a test he wasn’t sure he’d passed.
I thought about that man all the way home.
What I respected about that guy is that he was trying. Actually, trying to choose something that would land right, that would say what he wanted it to say. He was weighing his choices. He was trying to make his significant other happy. He was thinking of her (or him, I have no idea).
Today is Valentine’s Day. The holiday sits there in mid-February like a referendum on whether you’ve been paying attention, whether you know how to translate love into a gesture, and whether you can get it right when the calendar tells you it matters.
For me, I’ve realized Valentine’s Day gives you permission. It’s permission to buy the flowers. To write the card. To say the thing, we should probably say more often, but don’t because life is overwhelming and we’re tired and the bed is cozy and warm.
Without really going out on a limb, I’d say the man at Costco picked a dozen roses because roses mean something on Valentine’s Day. They mean something because we’ve all collectively agreed they do in the same way a diamond ring means something, or a handwritten note means something, or showing up to an event as a parent or a partner means something. The meaning isn’t in the object or the event. It’s in the attention.
I’ve been thinking about attention a lot lately. What I give my attention to, what is worthy of my attention, and how we show people they matter in a world that constantly asks us to pay attention to a million other things. Valentine’s Day, for all its commercial trappings, is a day when we’re culturally permitted to give someone our full attention.
Are you paying attention?
I don’t know if the man in Costco got it right. I don’t know if the roses landed the way he hoped or if they sat on a kitchen counter waiting to be thrown away. I hope they meant something. I hope whoever received them understood they represented genuine deliberation. He was paying attention.
Putting aside the heart-shaped boxes and the overwritten cards, Valentine’s Day says, it’s okay to try. It’s okay to be obvious. It’s okay to buy the flowers everyone knows are flowers, to make the gesture everyone knows is a gesture, and to hope it communicates something that sometimes is hard to say out loud.
Yeah, yeah… Valentine’s Day is all about monetizing love. It’s Hallmark and your local florist’s favorite holiday. I get it. However, I’ll take a world where people stand in front of flower coolers trying to get it right over one where nobody bothers at all.
Be seeing you.
