The Rose and the Thorns
By: Bob Collard
Tags: Friendship, Social Media, Loneliness, Depression, Psychology

Photo by Michael McAuliffe on Unsplash

How to handle a rose:

Dealing with yourself is a little like handling a rose.

You are like a rose — sublime, with languid folds of crimson petals… Beautiful…

Deep red, totally relaxed, and confidant with its beauty and place in the world.

Photo by Michael McAuliffe on Unsplash

But as if to contrast this beauty, the thorns await anyone who would seek to mishandle it. Unbelievably sharp, the points are the second thing you learn as a child about the rose.

Thorns have evolved in nature to protect the plant from being eaten by herbivores. It’s a pretty effective survival adaptation in a world where life is always trying to overtly steal resources from other living beings, up to and including the actual eating of the other life form itself.

Appropriation of the rose’s resources are pretty effectively stopped by their evolutionary development of a simple mechanical defense system — the thorn. Woe be the herbivore that attempts to eat the leaves of the genus Rosa, in the family Rosaceae. It’s a mistake that most herbivores only make once, if at all.

It’s like the rose is telling the universe — “look at me — aren’t I beautiful?

But don’t fuck with me, or you will regret it!”

So, let’s look in the mirror.

Photo by Jayson Hinrichsen on Unsplash

You are like a rose.

My comparison of yourself to a rose must also include the thorns.

Pricking points of negative emotion, our thorns have evolved as a defense against others who would appropriate our resources — physical and emotional.

In the process of growing up in this world, we develop many defenses to ward off would-be usurpers. Our brains are absurdly effective reality “modeling” machines that conjure up many defensive postures, including all the thought patterns involved with defensive stances against social aggressors around us.

Aggressors in society who have discovered a hack that all predators know — they can just appropriate the resources of others for their own advantage.

So, it is easy for our brains to hijack our imagination with scenarios of doom and gloom.

When you’ve been alive for several decades on this planet, you come to realized that your absolute best friend in the world is the one in the mirror. This must be friend number one.

It doesn’t matter how many friends you got, or how many friends you don’t got — you absolutely HAVE to be your own BFF.

It all starts here.

Your organism will be MUCH happier. This is how it’s supposed to work.

Photo by Liliia Beda on Unsplash

So, you must be careful. You must handle yourself with kid gloves. Take care, lest you come into direct contact with “negative” thoughts designed for defensive purposes against these outside social threats, real or imagined. This is the source of your sadness and depression — being pricked by your own thorns.

These defenses are designed to point “outward” — not inward.

And, if you occasionally do get pricked, just realize they are only a single-purpose adaptation against outside threats.

The keyword here is “outside”. They are meant for others — not for you.

You must change your grip on yourself to avoid being pricked.

So, be kind to yourself.

Let your rose lie languid in the universe.

Remember, its purpose is to attract the attention of others.

To be attractive.

To advertise your very existence in the world. To become a “genesis point” of life itself.

On so many different levels.

Photo by Tony Tran on Unsplash

Just do be careful to avoid your own thorns…

Now — re-read this article — but this time play this song in the background:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Yh6rnOchs&ab_channel=RHINO