What do you see in my picture?  Are they flowers?  Are they weeds?  Ted will say flowers.  I say … well they are flowers … but they are a bunch of weeds too.  Because most wildflowers are weeds.  Even if they have flowers blooming on their stems.

Ted loves wildflowers.  I think they are pretty but they tend to grow, well, wild.   Ted planted his wildflower garden in this vacant patch of dirt on the back side of our house where there is plenty of sun shine.  (That’s the only place I let him plant his seeds!)  He sees a wildflower garden and I see a flowering weed patch.

I started a new job today.  I work as the post-surgical nurse in an outpatient surgical center.  I saw fourteen cataract surgery patients as they came out of the operating room, and I saw fourteen different kinds of people.  They were young, old, male, female, weak, strong, healthy, fragile, simple-minded, educated, friendly, aloof, fat, skinny, clean and dirty.  But they were all there as patients getting cataract surgery on one of their eyes. 

As my job as nurse, I only saw them as patients.  It was after I came home that I thought about how different they really all were.  And I realized how my focus insists that I treat each one of them the same, and not judge by all the above mentioned characteristics.  I only needed to see them as patients because, in someone else’s eyes they were a dad, a mom, a brother, a sister, a wife, a husband, an aunt, an uncle, a cousin, or a friend. 

I think the lesson here is that what one person may see as having little value or worth may be a treasure in someone else’s eyes.  And if people were flowers, well then I know quite a few flowers with thorny stems as well as some others that don’t smell very nice.  Some of the flowers, err,  I mean people who I know are too flashy, too show-offy, or some are awfully sweet. 

So, keep in mind, that the person you think is a pestering unwanted weed…

…is someone else’s wildflower.

just Laurel