Consider a flower. If you like, consider this flower: my beautiful hyacinth. Every day it greets me with affection and I'm constantly awed by how it's doing what it's doing. It's grown so fast since it came out of the closet where it was quietly and colourlessly sprouting in the cold darkness over the winter. I'm rewarded each day by an additional spray of that intricate petal structure which is such a complex yet simple design. I don't understand where all the growth is coming from. Were the petals and leaves already inside when I bought it in the autumn as a dry, dead-looking bulb? Were they perhaps entwined inside and around each other, stacked tidily in exactly the right order so that it wouldn't fall over itself when it opened? Or did somebody climb inside once the shoot sprouted, and pack the petals in? This seems unlikely to me, if the gestation process of a flower is anything like that of a human. There would definitely be ethical issues with that. Was the intoxicating scent always inside? Could I perhaps have detected it if I'd put my nose into the dusty basket of bulbs in the garden centre, or were they hermetically sealed? Perhaps it's simply bigger on the inside than the outside, like Doctor Who's TARDIS, or a human being. This seems the most logical explanation to me. I know nothing about flowers. I won't be surprised if an average-sized Oompa-Loompa and his family climb out of it tomorrow, although that seems improbable, given that Oompa-Loompas come from Loompaland and not from hyacinths. Still, it's important to remain open-minded to all possibilities.Today's lesson could be: when you come out of your closet, you grow.
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