“Not necessarily achieving success counts as living. A life that only watching the sky, taking walks, and eating pizza is also very good. I came to this world, just to see how the flowers.”
That line from Soul lingers with me, almost like a piece of code that keeps running in the background of my thoughts. When I first began learning programming, I measured myself by the grand outcomes: could I build an app, design a system, impress someone with clever algorithms? Yet more often than not, the moments that stayed with me were the small, ordinary joys: watching the cursor blink patiently as I thought, walking outside to clear my mind after a stubborn bug, sharing late-night pizza with classmates who were stuck on the same assignment. These were not achievements in the résumé sense—but they were living.
In coding, grids are everywhere: tables, matrices, pixels, networks of logic. They give us order, but they can also constrain us. Sometimes I think of life itself as a grid, each cell a day we try to fill with meaning. The temptation is to seek the “highlight cells”—the moments of recognized success. But Soul reminds me that the quiet cells matter too: the sky, the walk, the flowers on the sidewalk I almost miss.
Community is what allows those small moments to breathe. Code is rarely written alone; it grows in ecosystems of documentation, forums, mentors, friends. The justice of these spaces—who gets included, who gets overlooked—is something I’ve become more aware of. Who has access to the tools, the time, the resources to see the “flowers” of technology? Who gets trapped in grids not of their own choosing? Justice, to me, is making sure the joy of building and discovering isn’t reserved for a few but can be shared across the community.
And so I come back to that quote. Maybe success is not the polished product but the process: a program that finally compiles, a friend who learns something new because I explained it, a flower of logic blooming inside a grid. I came into this world not only to chase outcomes, but to look up, take walks, eat pizza, and see how things grow—whether in gardens, in people, or in code.
Move your mouse over the yellow rainbow circles to see them turn black.