Imagine a flower. One of those flower buds with layered petals, growing upward, defying gravitation, petals closing over each other to conceal a mysterious center, like a blushing young tulip, or a rose bud, or a lotus flower. Now imagine this little girl. Maybe she is the flower, maybe she has the flower, maybe she is a little worm munching on the flower’s petals, maybe all of the above. The fact is that they were born at the same time, and now that the girl is old enough, she has set to open, detach and devour the flower’s petals one by one. She was told that once the petals were all explored and consumed, the center of the flower would reveal life’s meaning and nectar. And so, with grit (and thinking about it, I have to wonder – what is the difference between grit and greed?), and dedication, and discipline, she has set to munch on the leaves, assimilating them one by one, without sign of tiredness, without stopping, not even when she felt bloated, or when she felt like throwing up, not even when she saw herself growing out of proportions. The fatter the worm the more beautiful the butterfly, and this would be only a fortunate collateral, because the real prize was to get to the center and reveal the glowing meaning of life, which, just like death, no one had been able to describe to her just yet. Or, at least, not satisfactorily so.
This was not an uncommon situation. The space she occupied, along with her entire species, consisted of many iterations of this very scenario. Everyone, including her parents, was busy unraveling their flower’s center, one petal at a time. Some would die in the process, of digestive problems, without a chance to ever see their flower’s core. Others might be so feeble and with a mind so consumed by the time they finished all or almost all petals, that even if the core revealed itself to them, they would not see it, their mind fogged by the delusion of the petals’ memory and an amnesia of the original purpose.
But this girl was smart, and slowly and tenaciously, through a process that involved a lot of patience, certainly not a characteristic of her people, she consumed, she assimilated and eliminated petals one after another, senseless shapes that in the end would reveal a message not belonging to any of them alone. And as she went through this process, and every time she was a petal closer to the core, she was surprised to see that nothing more exciting was revealed, that all the petals were just the same, one after another, and maybe, just maybe, she thought, things had been even a bit more interesting in the beginning, when hope and intrinsic excitement were a gloss pertaining only to the outer layers. All the same color, all equally plain, beautiful but quite plain. Any treasure that was promised to be found on the journey to the core was not there, or, if it were, it is was not noticeable, anyway. Nothing really glittered, it was all mostly the same. But this did not detract her from the task, and she kept going and made progress and got to the last petal in record time, without dropping off on the way, neither entirely nor partially.
When just one single petal remained attached to the flower’s stem, which extended down to the empty abyss, the core was finally revealed and she could walk in and out of it, and walk around the petal in this manner, which was fine but not quite, because there was this petal in the way she had to walk around. But imagine that she was actually small in size compared to the flower (something she had not realized until then), and the petal provided cooling shade and changes in light as she moved around it. And, otherwise, the big surprise was that there was no surprise, the core was empty, it was hollow, just like the space surrounding the flower from the very beginning, when the flower was whole and the girl had not started the exploration. It was just the same as the interstices between the petals, too, where little treasures had been advertised and then identified as missing. And you may think that the discovery of this empty core came as the biggest disillusion ever to the little girl (by now maybe not so little anymore), who had worked so hard to discover that she was basically in the same place she had been all along, before she had set to this assiduous work. But no, there was no disappointment in the lack of prize, there was a relief at the realization that she had dwelled in the prize all along, even if without knowing it. Better later than never, she said to herself. Now, though, she had no desire to consume the last petal and she wondered how long until the petal would detach itself from the emptiness of the core to join the emptiness below. Or was it the fullness? All the same, she thought, untroubled.