Title of Tip: Slow Down, Smell the Flowers
Name: Angela Price, 40
Statement: Tomorrow is not promised. We could be here today and gone tomorrow, so appreciate the beautiful things life offers you because you never know when it’s over. Find a daily activity that will get you out of the house and be present in your surroundings. Slow down and look around. When it’s cloudy, the sky has different shapes. Flowers are pretty in their unique shape and color. Animals are curious and surprising.

Instructions: I don’t know if you can teach someone. They need to see for themselves what beauty is. Be still and pay attention, and you will recognize beautiful things. Don’t be in a hurry all the time. You don’t see things when you’re not paying attention. When you pay attention, you can see the different creations in flowers, how they’re blooming, and their colors. I count leaves on flowers and watch how they bloom, how they form, and how they grow. I like trees; I pay attention to how they’re formed and the different colors they hold. I wonder how old they are. The bigger they are, the older they are. I wonder about a lot of things. My mom always said, “Curiosity killed the cat.”
Learning: I lost my son in a car wreck in 2019. He was 16. They say it gets easier, but it doesn’t, and it never will. When it first happened, I locked myself in a bedroom for months. I didn’t speak to anybody. I wouldn’t eat. It was horrible. The only way I could cope was to get outside. I used to ride a bike—putting on my headphones and just riding. I might end up a couple of counties away before realizing, Oh, I’m this far; now I have to ride all the way back, but it helped. It would get my mind off things, being out in the open, because I’m constantly in my head all the time. Watching the different scenery go by, I never realized how beautiful things were.
Now that I’m sober, things are beautiful. There’s this bridge I like to visit on the bike path; it’s got a little peaceful waterfall. I take a blanket, lay out there, and listen to the waterfall and birds chirping. I stare up at the sky and listen to it. It’s something like meditating, like deep breathing; it relaxes you. I know my son wouldn’t want to see me as I was. He would like to see me sober, witnessing how beautiful things were because that’s just how he was; he thought everything in the world was beautiful, that everybody deserved a second chance, and I could do no wrong. He would tell people, “Don’t talk about my mom; that’s my mom; I’ll beat you up. I don’t care what you say; that’s my mom and the only mom I’ll ever have.” He was beautiful, and when I see flowers and stunning waterfalls, they remind me of him.
Story: When he was younger, my son and I used to ride bikes for hours. He would always stop and look at things, saying, “Mommy, look at this; this is so pretty.” And we would stop, sit, and look at it so he could examine it. It was so cute, and I miss that. He was an outdoors boy like most boys are, but he would want to look at everything. It would take us hours to get down the bike path because he would always want to stop. We would ride the bikes to John Bryan, put our bikes on the bike rack, and go hiking for hours. We would go to the bear cave. There were no bears, but he thought there were. He would play and draw little things in the sand. He would draw dogs in the sand. A ground dog is like a groundhog, but he would call it a ground dog.