A beautiful thing, for a moment

I step out on the balcony to admire the sun setting beyond the Indian Ocean. There are people scattered everywhere, strolling, sitting, playing, and generally enjoying their time off from whatever it is they do otherwise.

I watch a woman make her way across the sprawling lawn in front of me. As she approaches a Gulmohar tree, she stoops to pick up a fallen flower. She looks at it, then holds it up against the tree and the sky with her left hand as she manipulates her phone with the right to take a photograph. Task over, she tosses the flower aside and without a backward look, continues on her way.

The flower has had its day. It featured in a photograph. It will now follow its natural life and soon be compost. The tree will continue to grow, bloom, shed leaves and flowers, and be the occasional inspiration for other travellers. The photograph remains, an immortalised moment. The woman will also continue her course in life. Stopping at many such trees and photographing many such flowers. 

As human beings, admirers of beautiful things and users of many, do we accept this natural order of things? Why do we mourn the transience of beauty that runs its course? Why do we disapprove of a “roving eye” that flits from one beauty to another? Everything has its moment, but we want to hold on to it and immortalise it. Each of us has our time in the sun, but we can’t let go as easily as we latch on. Does true happiness lie in acceptance of the transience of all things? Especially the transience of the happiness itself?