Would you prefer to be considered as a flower or a weed? We admire flowers for their beauty. While in Japan, weeds symbolize tenacity because they keep coming back regardless of people trying to rip them out.
Nick Kemp explains how people can be like a flowering weed: tenacious and full of beauty.
Would you rather be a flower or a weed? If you’re a flower, you’re going to be recognized and admired for your beauty. You may be snipped up, bunched with other flowers, sold and put on display.
As you’re slowly dying, you’re going to be admired. Then when you become ugly or not as beautiful as you once were, you’re going to be discarded and eventually replaced by younger, beautiful flowers.
If you’re a weed, the others are against you, because people are gonna come after you, they’re going to try and rip you out of the environment. They’re gonna try and kill you, but you’ll come back because you have tenacity.
And when they rip you out again, you come back again because you have tenacity, you have the fighting spirit of a weed. So this perspective on weeds comes from Japanese culture. Japanese people can recognize the tenacity and fighting spirit of weeds.
They have a word for this: zasso-damashii. Zasso means weed and damashi means spirit. So we can translate it as the fighting spirit of weeds or the tenacity of weeds.
So what would you rather be? A beautiful flower or a tenacious weed? Now, what is interesting is there are weeds that flower such as daisy weeds. So perhaps we can all be that type of weed.
At the end of the day, what matters is not giving up and having tenacity rather than concerning yourself with how you look.