Flowers and faces

On CNN Today, I saw Kew Gardens in UK is collecting DNA of plants for future extinction. The TV beamed images of tropical flowers that i see everyday walking to and from home -- white spider lilies, orange orchids... It reminded me of film, Blue Seoul, how butterfly will be extinct..but also of a question I've always asked myself -- why did God make flowers?

One of the turning points in my life was to work part-time in a florist. The florist i worked for was located in the same building as a nightspot infamous for prostitutes and transvestites. At about 4 or 5pm, the restroom become office for the girls to put on make-up and assume their role for the night... it was eye-opening for me, i saw another world my parents have always protected me from... i never forgot the ritual these prostitutes make: the first thing they do when they enter the building is to pray to their gods in traditional Thai way... even the transvestites... yes, you won't believe they are men.. they are really beautiful...and they too, just struggling to make a living, like rest of us...

For so many people (myself included) working/studying life is a routine...But if routine makes life come to a standstill, isn't any moment in time exactly the same as another? Shouldn't we be able to fast forward and rewind time whenever we liked... to stop and start over again anytime we wished? Why should age matter, if life is a routine and Today = Yesterday = Tomorrow?

Sometimes, when someone ask me for my age, i like to joke that "i'm 100 years old." It's such a habit of mine i forget how it got started. Now, i remember... there is a 90-year-old old lady with the exact, same name as me in the airline records...and the airline people always gets us confused..I think of this 90-year-old woman i'd never met..what happens if we switched our lives for one day ...or one century...?

Thinking back, perhaps asking "why God made flowers?" is similar to asking "why God made man and woman?" In almost all flowers, there are the male flower and also female flower... maybe we are not so different from flowers... we just want to bloom and be fruitful, no matter how short or long our lives may be...