Walk With Flowers Day 2011

*) You are here. (Or a friendly stranger of your choice.)

On January 16th, let’s walk with flowers.

From Walk With Flowers:

When you walk the street with a bunch of flowers, interesting things will happen. People will smile at you, give you space to walk, and you will see this special glow in the eyes of many of them. Flowers are romantic, and most people have some kind of enjoyable memory of a day they received a bouquet, or they were giving one to a loved person.

Walking with flowers gets even more interesting when you start giving them away. And the idea is giving them to somebody you never met before. You can give your flowers away randomly or with a clear focus: The lonely lady with the bored face; the fighting couple; the tired street vendor at the bus stop.

A bunch of roses costs about 2 or 3 dollars around here. They may be more expensive where you are, but you can probably grow some in your garden. Be it work or money, it’s generally a small investment – but the returns will be huge, even though the common businessman won’t be able to measure them: Smiles, surprise, happiness. An invitation for coffee even, alhough that certainly wasn’t my intention.

I swear I saw a tear flowing once, when I gave a whole bouquet to a middle-aged businesswoman in Bogotá who had been making phone calls nervously for half an hour before I decided to get her some flowers. We didn’t even speak a single word.

If we enjoy voluntary simplicity, why not include some voluntary kindness in our lives? I think it’s nice to be nice, and I suppose most people would agree with that.

On January 16th, on the vigil of Art’s Birthday, we will celebrate the First International Walk With Flowers Day!

We believe that life itself is a work of art, and thus, it should be celebrated as often as possible.

We are no friends of PR hype, so the idea is not to make this yet another marketing event for the flower industry. (Valentine’s Day is more than enough!)

Instead, we just want to embrace this day to be friendly to strangers and interact with them - for a couple of seconds, minutes, or even hours. The goal is to have a nice day and make it nicer for someone else, too. And who knows, you might even make a new friend (or two)!

If you are interested to participate, you could actually walk with flowers, but you could also:

You could also engage in non-material acts of kindness:

There is no need to sign up or document anything, but if you’d like to do that anyway, please send a quick mail to fabian (at) friendlyanarchist (.) com! We’d certainly love to hear from you, before or after the day.

If anybody would like to showcase some drawings, poems, photos, videos etc. related to Walk With Flowers Day, it would be a pleasure to publish them here, too. But the most important thing, as we already wrote, is not getting publicity and millions of people participating, but having a great day!

The Walk With Flowers Day is brought to you by Monthly Adventure and The Friendly Anarchist. Be sure to check out the other events of this year's Art’s Birthday.