We often forget to do this one little thing.  It can make all the difference in our lives.   

I had forgotten this.  Children, finishing University, work, cooking, cleaning, doing, doing, going, going.  It was tiring me out.  Big time.  And for good reason.  I wasn't stopping to smell the roses.  I'd forgotten what that even meant.  At some point it began to mean to stop and smell pretty flowers when you pass them by.  If you feel like it. 

And then one day I got a present.  A little, snow white, fluffy puppy.  Cute as a button and sweet as could be.  Once she could go up and down stairs, I took to taking her to do her business in the front yard.  While most people have their gardens out back, there was too much playing and rumpusing out there for there to be any sort of real grass let alone a garden.  So instead we gardened our front yard with all sorts of plants and flowers, three kinds of rose bushes, tall grasses, all our favorites.  

I had just wanted her to go so I could go back inside and finish whatever it was I was doing, when she did a most curious thing.  She stopped at a flower and sniffed it.  "How cute,"  I remember thinking.  "What a sweet thing to do."  And she walked a little further and she did the same to the next flower.  And the next and the next. 

The next time I took her out there, she did the same thing.  And the time after that.  And it continued.  A little habit of hers that really started to make me think. 

I didn't stop to smell the roses any more.  I didn't just look around me peacefully, just appreciating everything around me, without thinking.  I wasn't slowing down.  I was so used to having to be one step ahead for work, for school, for four little beans running around, that my brain was always in overdrive. 

I had forgotten what it was to be peaceful.  And to smell a flower properly, that's exactly what you have to do, is be peaceful.