For a long time, I thought growing up meant making everyone around me happy. My parents’ expectations formed one wall; school rules formed another; other people’s eyes made a third. I built one more myself, with rules about what scores I had to get, what kind of person I should be, how many people I needed to like me. Inside those walls I felt safe, though the air was stale.
Then came high school. One night after evening study hall, I walked out of the building and my deskmate pointed up. “Look how full the moon is.” I raised my head. There it was, the same moon I used to watch from the balcony as a child. I hadn’t looked up at it in a very long time.
In that moment I understood something: I had run a long way and chased a lot of things, but I had left my own feelings behind. The walls were still there, taller than before.
In my second year of high school, I did badly on a mock exam. My chest felt blocked. I begged my father to take me to the countryside for some air. Leaning against the car window, I watched the scenery slide backward. Fields passed in patches, some green, some yellow. Village after village went by, white walls and dark roofs, thin threads of smoke rising from chimneys. Sparrows rested on roadside utility poles and didn’t fly away when the car passed. Under a bridge, a cow grazed slowly.
The sun sank. As it neared the horizon, the clouds took color from below upward: first orange-red, then pink-purple, with a little gray-blue left at the top. The red reflected on the car window, and I could feel the warmth on the back of my hand. When the sun went down, only a thin band of light remained at the horizon, as if someone had dipped a brush in gold powder and drawn a single stroke across the sky. Then even that was gone.
The sky darkened. The clouds turned from color back to gray. The shadows of trees dissolved into the night. Here and there, lights came on in the villages.
My father said, “Do you know my favorite time in the countryside? This. The lights have just come on, and the sky isn’t completely dark yet. Some people are walking slowly; some are running slowly. Watching them, I feel that being alive is good.”
He pulled the car to the side of the road. We sat there without speaking. From somewhere outside came the faint sound of people laughing. I noticed that I didn’t feel so bad anymore.
Later, I thought about that evening often. My father didn’t give me a lecture or teach me study methods or offer soothing words. He just sat with me for a while and let me see again that beyond scores and rankings, a teenager’s heart can hold many other things. Beyond climbing step by step, growing up can also mean walking slowly through open fields and noticing wildflowers by the road.
From that day on, I did something secretly. Before sleep, I wrote down three very small things in a notebook: the cafeteria aunt gave me an extra half spoonful of food; the orange cat by the road looked so silly sunbathing that I liked it; the sunset before evening study hall was pink-purple. At first it felt a little foolish. Later I found that when I started paying attention to these small things, the things that bothered me faded without my noticing, like ink dropped into water, spreading slowly and then disappearing.
The wall was still there, but flowers had bloomed along its base.
Slowly I understood: real growth isn’t knocking the wall down. It is learning to open a window in it, so light can come in, wind can come through, and the scent of flowers can drift inside.