Pleasures of less choice !

I drove through Bottmingen  recently,  the village where we first lived after arriving to Switzerland. I had nearly forgotten one of my first surprise experiences about  "slow life" at the "cut your own flowers" field  in the town beside the road.

I love flowers.  There was a wild red rose bush  in the garden at my parent's house; my father regularly brought in the house a collection from this bush for all of us to enjoy. Whoever we visited,  we rarely went without buying them flowers, so it is normal for me to buy flowers for all kinds of occasions and people, teachers, family and myself.  The wide variety of flowers in flower shops, the  wall sized display full of colourful  ribbons,  many different decorating accessories were always lovely to play around with.  

In Baselland  a financially and personally rewarding way to get a bouquet of flowers is from the "cut your own flower"field, which probably exists all over Switzerland.

These fields are owned by local communities or privat families and they keep the fields productive, maintained  by planting each season flowers for the public to cut, pay at  the "honesty pay box",  and take home. The flowers are cheaper of course than in shops, and there is                                   an  on the spot "service unit" to prepare your own bouquet.

In Bottmingen this is organised  in a very professional way. You arrive, put on an available clean plastic shoe cover to protect and prevent your shoes from getting dirty or muddy, take the always available and clean garden shears  and enter the rows of flowerbeds to explore, enjoy and freely make your choice of the seasonal actual variety of colourful flowers. When you have spent the amount of time you liked picking your flowers, you go to the service unit again, cut off excess green leaves,  you bind together your bouquet with the thread that is there for you protected from the rain, take off your shoe protection, put it in the dirty box, you throw the calculated amount of money into the cashier box, and you are ready to take home your wonderful, fresh seasonal  actual bouquet.  I am always happy with this natural bouquet  as if it came from my own garden and I didn' t even have to do all the gardening work in advance. 

At the same time, if  I go into Coop, Migros or a local flower shop to buy flowers, even after 5 years living in Switzerland  I can't avoid  missing a larger variety of flowers, the bigger choice of size and colour of ribbons and wrapping paper, the richness of decoration that my brain links to the expression "flower shop". 

My mindset  of choice starts working,  I start spending  time figuring out how my perfect  bouquet will look like.  Then I suddenly bump into the problem of not seeing enough yellow or orange or  whatever colour of flowers I would like to compose from, not enough types of ribbons, and too  few types of  anything else to decorate. The feeling  of  "not  enough" takes over and the potential satisfaction coming from an imagined picture of leaving the shop with a perfect bouquet of flowers dissolve.  As we step out of the simple and  natural, there  seems  to remain a constant better solution we are inclined to search for.

Beside the flowerbed I happily  accept the natural choice given by the seasonal variety, and it is a joy to make my own simple bunch.  But after  having tried out  the different combinations of the  many choices in a flower shop, there is a feeling  that there might still be an even better choice than the one we have already made.

Can it be,  that, above a certain amount of choices, we  can’t get  satisfied with whatever we do regardless of the choice we made?

Have you ever had  this feeling before ?   

Of course I slowed down , turned into the parking  of the “selbst pflücken Blumen”  field and  got my flowers that I am still enjoying.

Where do you get your flowers from?