She Blossoms Before the World Wakes

What do you do at 2 in the morning? Fast asleep? Doom-scrolling? Those are the usual answers. But for my aunt, 2AM is when her day begins.

She runs her own florist. Call it arts if you want to dress it up, but truthfully, it’s graft.

Every day, come rain or shine, bitter cold or blazing heat, she drive for an hour to the market to collect fresh blooms. Her routine sounds straightforward enough: fetch the flowers, trim them, and arrange them into bouquets. But it’s far from simple. She spends hours bent over stems, snipping and tidying until late at night. On busy days, she barely touches a meal because the orders keep her hands too full.

She’s always had a knack for anything creative from what I can recall, whether it was cooking or arranging things just so. Through Facebook crafting groups she found flower-arranging classes, taught herself, and eventually swapped her job in advertising for a life surrounded by flowers and wrapping papers at home.

I often wonder why she chose it. She does the lot herself, sourcing, arranging, photographing, checking orders. When she’s out for events like a wedding, the pace quickens; she preps a day’s worth of orders before leaving the house by 5AM. Apart from those occasions, she’s at home most of the time.

Compared to her old career, this work is neither easier nor related. When I asked her why she made the switch, she simply said: “Because I love flowers. I’ve loved them for years. After all that time working for others, now I want to do what I like.”

And so she does. Working from home hasn’t made life easier, it’s actually harder. No days off, no fixed hours, no benefits, everything bends around the customer. Yet, somehow, she seems content. Busier, yes. More tired, certainly. But she’s happy in her own little world of petals and stems, building it bouquet by bouquet.

Maybe that’s the thing about work, we’re all chasing “easier” when in reality, the good stuff is usually the opposite. She swapped office life for early mornings and endless stems, and somehow came out happier. It makes me think: perhaps it’s less about finding the perfect job, and more about finding something you don’t mind losing sleep over.