Yu Qiutong, Class 1, Senior 1, Shenzhen Foreign Languages School Instructed by Yang Suning

In my younger and more immature years, I showed considerable scorn towards my mom for she is always trying various new things, which from my perspective, is vacuous. Middle-aged as she is, she still possesses the curiosity and passion of a child and tries to do things like cooking new types of cuisine and teaching herself yoga, sometimes even popular dances to keep up with the trend.

I used to consider all these as a waste of time because those things are just meaningless. But after all these years, I find she still seems to be very young for there is always something that glitters in her eyes. I discovered that she is always passionate about life, and tries everything to make her tomorrow a brand new day.

Therefore, I came to realize that my mom is actually admirable for her spirit of trying new things in her busy life of both being a responsible mom and a dietitian. She often tells me that the key to remaining happy is to find the newness in life, and I’ve been giving it a try ever since I entered senior high school.

The stressful high school life for a long time used to make me nervous and uneasy. The days are humdrum and extremely long. Every week I have to stay six days here suffering from the tremendous amount of homework and invisible peer pressure. There was a time when I felt I could hardly breathe. During this time, it occurred to me that I really needed to apply my mom’s philosophy to finding my own vitality out of the boring life, and it was just at that time I discovered that the color of the sunrise in our school differs variously every day, from brightly blazing red to faded pink and sometimes light orange, but without exception they are breathtaking and fuel my energy at the beginning of the day.

This new discovery provided a key for me to open a totally different world, a world that has existed for years that is indiscernible but astonishingly amazing, the world full of newness. Daily school work and preparations for the college entrance examination have limited me from taking up lots of hobbies like my mom. Nevertheless, what I can do is to treat each day as a brand new day.

Jack Kerouac once said in his book “On the Road,” “Forever young, forever weeping.” Just as the saying goes, one can never decide the length of life, but can decide the depth of it. We deepen and broaden our life by pursuing newness and by always being passionate and curious about life, which gives us strength and a reason to lead a meaningful life.