Little March

Michel Heitzmann

This morning my phone told me it was Mărțișor.

I lived in Romania in my twenties. Every March 1st, the streets would fill with vendors selling mărțișoare — small fresh flowers tied to a twisted red and white cord. The red for warmth and life, the white for the winter that’s leaving. Men give them to women. Kids give them to teachers. Strangers buy them from old women sitting on folding chairs next to buckets of snowdrops.

The word itself means “little March.” Micul Martie. A diminutive. As if the whole month were something tender enough to hold in your hand.

I haven’t thought about this in fifteen years. Not once. And this morning, there it was on my screen, between the lunar phase and the day’s natural light forecast. A cultural calendar entry. Mărțișor. March 1.

I sat with it for a while.

The world is not in a quiet place right now.

There is a war in Ukraine that has been going on for so long that it barely makes the front page anymore. Two days ago the United States and Israel struck Iran. Khamenei is dead. The Strait of Hormuz is closed to shipping. Iran is retaliating across the Gulf. Pakistan has declared open war on Afghanistan and is bombing Kabul. Gaza has been razed. Sudan’s civil war has displaced millions. Myanmar, Yemen, Syria, the eastern Congo. There are people right now, today, March 1st, 2026, who are waking up in places where spring means nothing because survival has replaced seasons.

I scroll past these headlines every morning. We all do. The feed delivers them between an ad for running shoes and someone’s opinion about productivity. The algorithm flattens everything. A ceasefire negotiation sits next to a recipe for banana bread. A bombing sits next to a meme. We are not designed to hold all of this at once, and yet the architecture of our information lives demands that we try.

This is what I think about when I think about noise. Not just the volume. The flattening. The way everything arrives at the same weight, the same speed, in the same endless scroll. Nothing is given space. Nothing is given time. A war and a weather update occupy the same pixel height.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, today, in Romania and Moldova, people are handing each other small flowers.

I don’t think most people know about Mărțișor. It’s not a tradition that trends. It doesn’t have a hashtag campaign or a brand partnership. No one is selling you a Mărțișor experience. It just happens, quietly, every year, because people decided a long time ago that the first day of March meant something. That the shift from winter to spring deserved to be marked. Not with a sale or an event, but with a small flower and a piece of twisted string.

The tradition is at least two thousand years old. Some scholars trace it back eight thousand. It predates Rome. It predates most of the structures we now use to organise our attention. And yet it persists. Not because someone is promoting it. Because it means something.

Red for life. White for the passing of winter. A small object worn near the heart until the first tree blossoms, and then tied to a branch.

There is something almost unbearably tender about that. Especially today. Especially now. In a world that is loud and broken and moving too fast, people are still doing this. Still marking the turn. Still saying to each other: winter is ending. Here. Take this small thing. Wear it until spring arrives.

I forgot about Mărțișor. For twenty five years I forgot. And I don’t think that’s because I stopped caring about Romania or about spring or about traditions. I think it’s because nothing in my daily information diet was designed to remind me.

Algorithms don’t surface Romanian spring traditions. They surface what keeps you scrolling. They surface conflict and outrage and novelty and fear, because those things generate engagement. A two-thousand-year-old tradition of handing someone a flower does not generate engagement. It generates meaning. And meaning is not the same currency.

I think about this a lot now. The things we lose without noticing. Not the dramatic losses — those announce themselves. I mean the quiet ones. A tradition you used to observe. A person you used to call on their birthday. A street you used to walk for no reason. A kind of attention you used to pay to the sky. A festival in a country you once lived in that you haven’t thought about in over a decade.

These disappearances don’t happen because we decide to stop caring. They happen because nothing in our daily architecture is designed to remind us. Our feeds are optimised for engagement, not remembrance. For novelty, not return. For what’s trending, not what’s rooted.

I built something that tries to work differently.

It’s not a news app. It’s not a social network. It’s a quiet companion that, among other things, tells you what today means. Not what’s trending today. What today actually is. The cultural rhythms, the ancestral calendars, the observances that people around the world have marked for centuries. The things that don’t make the feed but make the day.

This morning it told me it was Mărțișor. And it stopped me in a way that nothing in my feed has stopped me in months. Not because it was urgent. Because it was true. Because it connected me to a version of myself that used to live in a place where people handed each other flowers on the first day of spring. A version I had forgotten existed.

That is what I think technology should do. Not demand attention. Not optimise engagement. Not flatten the world into a scroll. But quietly, without fanfare, remind you that today means something. That somewhere, someone thought this day was worth marking. And that maybe, if you sit with it for a moment, you’ll remember something you didn’t know you’d forgotten.

Iran is being bombed. Khamenei is dead. Pakistan and Afghanistan are at open war. Ukraine grinds on. Sudan burns. And in the middle of all that, people in Romania and Moldova are waking up this morning and buying small flowers from vendors on the street. They are pinning them near their hearts. They are saying to their mothers, their daughters, their colleagues, their friends: La mulți ani . To many years. May you live long. May spring come.

I don’t know if there is a lesson in that. Maybe just an observation.

The things that endure are rarely the things that shout. They are small. They are quiet. They are tied with string and worn until the trees bloom.

La mulți ani de Mărțișor.