For most of human history, survival mattered enormously.

Food mattered. Shelter mattered. Tools mattered.

And then, somewhere along the way, somebody picked a flower.

Not to eat it.

Not to build with it.

Not because it could keep them warm.

Simply because it was beautiful.

In A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle points to something remarkable about our relationship with flowers. At some point, human beings began valuing them despite their having little practical importance to our survival.

Think about how strange that is.

We live in a world where usefulness carries enormous weight. We ask what something does, what it costs, what it produces and what we can get from it.

Yet some of the things we value most refuse to play by those rules.

A piece of music may produce nothing.

A sunset accomplishes nothing.

A flower sitting in a vase may serve no practical purpose at all.

And still they matter.

We take flowers to weddings and funerals. We give them to express love, gratitude and sorrow. We grow them in gardens simply so that, for a little while, they will be there.

Perhaps usefulness is not the only measure of value.

Perhaps the things that feed us are not always the things that keep us alive.

Somewhere between survival and living, human beings seem to have discovered another kind of need — for beauty, music, poetry, wonder and things that exist without having to justify themselves.

Maybe the flower has been quietly reminding us of this all along.

Not everything valuable has to be useful.

And perhaps a life measured only by usefulness would leave out some of the things that make it worth living.