Can we be like sunflowers?

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1887. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Did you know that younger sunflowers follow the sun? And then, as sunflowers get older, they start facing eastwards? The phenomenon where younger sunflowers face the sun is known as heliotropism. Other flowers that are heliotropic are buttercups and arctic poppies.

As many of you already know, I look to nature and flowers and I care very much about metaphors and symbolism and meaning.

I was thinking about how these young flowers follow the sun when they are older and then when they grow and mature, they do their own thing, and really practise more autonomy.

If you think about it in terms of human intelligence, consider this for a moment- if you think about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence, research seems to suggest that people's fluid intelligence seems to decline as they age. ( Fluid intelligence is the ability to think flexibly, to adapt, while crystallized intelligence is defined as the knowledge, skills and factual repository of information that is gleaned over several decades of our lives.)

Both of these intelligences (and really, multiple intelligences) are key for us to make critical life choices judiciously.

But if we, as younger people, keep an open mind, learn and adapt, think of ways to be flexible and as older people draw on our wealth of information, and also teach ourselves do both, how would it be?